


The Time Traveler's Boyfriend

by Square Pudding (mistaken)



Category: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: A chapter that is basically all sex, Anal Sex, Astroglide was made for space shuttles you know, Condoms, Cuddling, Fluff and Smut, Hand Jobs, Happy Ending, High emotional stakes, Ill-advised sex while high, Kissing, M/M, Massage, Matchmaking, Of course Gypsy is well-versed in feminist queer theory, Oral Sex, Recreational Drug Use, Scratching, Tags will be added with further chapters, Time Travel, canon-typical fourth wall breakage, canon-typical weirdness, just a tiny one, musical numbers, safe sex, sly crossover, stoner!Joel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-29
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 05:26:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 43,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2376446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistaken/pseuds/Square%20Pudding
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Listen: Mike Nelson has come unstuck in time. This is fortuitous for Joel Robinson, who was craving some company.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Day 0

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to gerbilfluff for the beta!
> 
> Does not actually have anything to do with the similarly-titled book by Audrey Niffenegger. Well, there's time travel, but that's about it.
> 
> New chapters every Monday! Tags will be updated as the plot (read: porn) advances.

**Day 0**

"Joel, tell me another story."

"Not tonight, Tommy. You've had five already."

"Please?"

"Come on, Servo, you'll spoil your imagination. Now, let's put the boxers down and turn in, okay?"

"Aw..."

The door to Tom's cabin swished open around a minute later, depositing a sleepy-eyed Joel Robinson into the central corridor of the Satellite of Love's habitation deck. As the door shut behind him, he exhaled a long breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in.

The week was done. Tapes and reports had all been logged. The bots had been tucked in and the ship was quiet. The bridge, even if he had gone up to have a look, was mute with the lights turned down. Cambot was in standby mode. Gypsy, as usual, was at the helm and couldn't be bothered.

_Another night 22 thousand miles from the next living human being,_ Joel thought to himself. He resisted the urge to sigh again. _At least Tom's old enough to sleep all the way through the night on his own now._

Ambling back to his own quarters, Joel ran through his old Mantra of Gratitude. There were plenty of things for him to be thankful for, he reminded himself, and just because his only human contact was in the form of two abusive mad scientists who called him things like "Joely-poly" or "square pudding" or variations thereon didn't mean that he had to be lonely.

His bots loved him, even if Crow was reaching a difficult age. And Joel hadn't exactly kept a full social calendar back on Earth to begin with, so what did he care if every last free night and weekend of the past five (or maybe six, depending on how you counted) years was spent holed up in a satellite? Even if he _had_ had the benefit of human company, what would he do with it?

_Well, just talk and stuff,_ a slightly less zen part of his brain fired back. _What would be so bad about that? Just someone around the same age with similar interests and... fully articulated hands and things._

_Oh, now you're asking too much,_ yet another part of his brain chided.

Joel rolled his eyes and tipped his head back, chuckling at his own inner monologue. And here he had invented the bots to _prevent_ talking to himself.

He turned the corner down the hallway toward his cabin, the only one on the ship properly outfitted for human habitation. It wasn't much, but the room contained his bunk, his locker and his workbench, and that was good enough, even if the view was getting stale after all this time. Any place was going to start to feel claustrophobic after a while, and Joel was a homebody, not a monk, for crying out loud. Even a single parent of a bunch of robots had needs, but he couldn't just...

"Hey, whoa! It's you!"

Stolen away from his train of thought, Joel took in the sight of his cabin, which was exactly as he had left it, except that -- unlike this morning -- there was a stranger standing in the middle of it.

The man stood in a blue jumpsuit, not too dissimilar from Gizmonic's standard issue, though in place of the company logo he wore a name tag. He was youngish and tallish -- if Joel had to guess, he'd peg him as being about his own age and around his own height, maybe a couple inches taller. Broader in the shoulders, certainly, and also in the jaw. Actually his whole head was kind of... beef-roasty.

Now, a sensible individual would probably react to a strange (albeit affably handsome and curiously familiar) man in their room by shouting, shutting the door, locking it and calling for help. But Joel was preternaturally easy-going, and even if he hadn't been, the bowl that he'd smoked before the last leg of today's movie had yet to exit his system. So instead he merely stood in the doorway, transfixed at the sight of, apparently, the universe granting his wish.

"Oh, hey," Joel managed. His brow furrowed as he struggled to come up with the clever rest of his greeting.

Fortunately, it seemed like the newcomer couldn't be bothered just then. "Look, this is gonna sound weird," the good-looking apparition continued, "but my name's Mike and, uh, I've come from the future."


	2. Day 1

**Day 1**

The facts, as Mike explained the next morning, were these:

-Mike was Joel's successor as designated human guinea pig aboard the Satellite of Love, which was fine, except that:

-The project had been shut down and the SOL had started accelerating toward the Earth, during which time:

-He and the gang hit some kind of time-space convergence tear thingie, separating them and hurtling Mike through adjacent realities including one involving horrifying crab people, and finally to here, back aboard the Satellite of Love, only:

-Joel was still here, which meant Mike had gone back in time as well as space, and boy, Mike couldn't remember the last time he'd hung around other normal humans, and:

-Are you going to finish that?

Joel looked down at what remained of his veggie-protein breakfast scramble and obligingly slid the plate over to Mike's side of the table.

Sitting to opposite sides of their creator, Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot were still looking askance at their new guest. Mike's explanation made sense enough, as far as anything that happened aboard the station made sense, but Mike had a big broad country-boy face that apparently just _screamed_ Zodiac Killer to them, and the bots were nothing if not protective of their father-inventor.

"Anyway," Mike continued, producing three charming little spice shakers from nowhere to dash on his eggs, "I dunno how long I'll keep moving backwards and forwards like this, but this is the nearest to my own universe that I've wound up in for months. You don't mind if I stick around, do you? It kind of feels like home these days."

"Sure, we don't mind," Joel answered without hesitating, which earned his fingers a nip from Tom's dispenser beak.

"Psst!" Tom stage-whispered, hovering above his seat. "I don't know if we should trust this guy! He looks like a Packers fan."

"Hey now, I am not," Mike spoke up without missing a beat. "I mean... not _much_ of one. I did catch most of the game when we won the Super Bowl in '97."

"He's _lying!_ " Crow growled, climbing over between Joel and Servo. "Next he'll say the Vikings _ever_ win something!"

Joel waved his two bots aside to give him a bit of space, while Mike -- as nonchalantly as before -- continued to shovel scrambled eggs into his mouth. The spice shakers had vanished again, but that was a mystery for later.

Joel leaned forward, arms folded on the table, and considered his guest.

Probably, he should at least consider what Tom and Crow were saying. Wasn't it funny, that a guy just so happened to turn up when Joel was itching for human company? ...But that was the point, Mike's mere presence was _miraculous_. He didn't seem really real, even as Joel's senses told him that there he was, occupying the space in front of him. So it was hard to turn away from all the new and tactile possibilities Mike presented.

Joel wanted to wrap his hands around Mike's forearms and ascertain that the flesh and bone there were solid. He wanted to put his fingers to his wrist and verify a pulse, and smell and taste him and all sorts of things that he knew very well were inappropriate for a first meeting. It had just been so _long_ and...

"So, hang on, one thing's bugging me," Joel drawled sleepily, diverting himself before he fell too far down that particular rabbit hole. "Why do I leave the station? I couldn't just leave Tom and Crow and Gypsy behind..."

Mike shrugged, swallowing down his eggs with a tall cup of milk before answering. "I don't think you had a lot of say in it," he said. "I dunno, it was a few years ago, I just went along with what Gypsy told me. I didn't even meet you until, like, a couple months ago. Uh, in my time."

"I came back?"

"Yeah, the ship was falling apart. Some sort of sabotage protocol Doctor F built into it to kick in after so long."

Joel absently glanced toward the ceiling, his brow furrowing. Suddenly, it seemed to matter a heck of a lot more whether he had been marooned up here five years or six.

"You didn't stay, though. You had to get back to Earth," Mike went on, unconcerned.

"Did I say what I did after I left? Um, do I say what I did? Boy, these tenses are confusing."

"Yeah, yeah, the grammar of temporal paradoxes," Tom shouted suddenly, hoverskirt lifting him up so that he floated squarely between the two men, as if to keep them apart. "Can we get back to how this Mike guy is _a total lying faker_ here and he's probably gonna kill us all in our sleep?"

"Tom, Mike is our guest and you need to be polite," Joel sighed, with nary a raised syllable. He deftly grabbed the little red bot by his midsection and guided him back down to the breakfast bench.

This was not met without protest, as Tom proceeded to bite and spit like the terrible red toddler he was. Mike, however, didn't seem fussed at all by these outbursts. He turned his attention to Crow and Servo and addressed them directly this time.

"Look, guys," he said. "I know I must seem awfully suspicious--"

"Yeh, especially when you use lines like that!" Crow pointed out.

The man from the future bit his lip but plowed on ahead. "Look, I can prove it to you guys, all right? Like... Crow, I know that you use a Unix-based operating system and bubblewrap memory."

"That's cyber-based bubble memory and you coulda just looked that up!"

"Okay, well -- Tom, I know that you have an impressive underwear collection in your room."

"Hey, yeah, how di--" Tom Servo's head swiveled sharply. "A spy! He's been spying on us! He's a sleeper cell from Doctor F! Joel, jettison this pinko!"

"I really don't think he's a communist spy, guys," Joel answered patiently, patting Servo's shoulder gently. He gave Mike an apologetic glance. "Though, you do kinda look like this Soviet comedian we ran into once..."

"Uh. Sorry, I guess?" Mike hazarded.

Joel bore his guest a wry smile. What was it that cosmonaut with the shoddy bots had told him, when he'd made a pass? _'You are AC and we are DC, we are not compatible.'_ Harsh, guy...

Ah, but that was ancient history. Mike's wide dopey face said farmboy, not special operative, and anyway, even if Mike _was_ a Russian spy, the Cold War was over and Joel was _pretty_ sure they were compatible in most of the ways that counted. Anyway, he was hoping.

"Say," Joel said instead, brightening. "You need any spare clothes while you're up here? I got some extra."

"Oh. Yeah," Mike said, as if only just made aware that he had clothes on him at all. "Actually I'm still wearing your tube socks."

Seeming eager to demonstrate this, Mike scooted his chair away from the table and hitched up a pant leg, revealing a formerly-white sock with black and blue stripes near the cuff, worn (inexplicably) with sandals. Joel immediately recognized it as the sock he had once lost in the laundry, until Gypsy had presented to him for Christmas a couple years back.

Crow and Servo seemed to recognize it too, as they let out a long, shrill gasp in unison.

"He _is_ from the future!" Tom exclaimed.

* * *

Most of the rooms on the Satellite of Love were not suited for human habitation, mainly for lack of climate control and a tendency to attract space bedbugs. Joel had learned this the hard way during the first couple years of his captivity.

Fortunately, the cabin with his bunk and workbench was actually built for two people: a pilot and copilot. Joel had tossed the other mattress some time ago and taken up the space with his boxes of model paints and spare accordion keys, but it was only the ordeal of an afternoon to clear some floor space and find the sleeping bag with the spare bedding.

Joel insisted on taking the bedroll. Mike maintained that this was still Joel's room, temporally speaking, but from Joel's point of view Mike was a guest, and that was that.

"It'll be like a camping trip in my own room," Joel drawled. During the course of the cleanup, he and Mike had both pulled their jumpsuits down to their waists, and now that the possibility of an early night was presenting itself Joel had also slipped off his sneakers and was rearranging his makeshift bed in his socks.

"Just get us a six-pack and a lake of trout and we'll be set," Mike chuckled, fanning his neck with the collar of his undershirt. It, like the rest of his clothes, had seen better days.

"Shoot, you know there's a reservoir below the desalination deck, right? We can go boating tomorrow if you wanna."

"We have a desalination deck?" Mike frowned as his gaze slipped to one of Joel's posters, the Clint Eastwood one, which seemed to have caught his eye. Or maybe the contact lenses he'd fabricated from the galley replicator weren't a match for his prescription. "...Huh. Sure, boating sounds fun. And the fish?"

Joel's eyebrows tilted with concern. "Uh, it's the stuff we drink, so... no. Sorry."

"Oh. Right."

"I mean, one time it got full of brine shrimp," Joel continued. "But I made Crow promise he'd _never_ do that again."

Mike laughed again. And _gosh_ , that laugh, even his laugh was handsome, how did that even work? Joel fought down the urge to ask if he could touch Mike's throat while he did that, to feel his vocal cords vibrate under his fingers. Instead, he stuck his hands in the pockets of his jumpsuit and kept them there.

His guest failed to notice any of this hands-in-pockets business and simply made a vague gesture with his hand toward the door of the cabin. "Hey, you mind if I go, uh, freshen up?" Mike asked. "Last time I had a shower I'm pretty sure I was in a Mirror Universe being tortured by myself in a gold vest and a goatee."

Joel snagged on that mental image for a moment, then he caught up again. "Sure," he said. "Bathroom's down the... well, I guess you know, huh?"

* * *

Mike returned around half an hour later, scrubbed clean and in Joel's spare bathrobe, having graciously sacrificed his one set of clothes (including his pair of Joel's socks) to the laundry chute. Joel, who had in the meantime switched into PJs and distracted himself fiddling with the wiring for an upcoming invention exchange (motorized trick playing cards), looked up from his workbench and froze, feeling a funny zigzag of electricity up his spine.

"Hope you don't mind," Mike muttered.

"No, no," Joel hastened to say, realizing he was staring. He tried resuming his previous slouch. If he had a tail, he was sure it would be wagging just then. "Mi casa es su casa, compadre."

Mike looked pretty good all washed up, with his damp blond hair combed back and the age lines at the corners of his eyes softened. He was a bit too broad in the shoulders for the bathrobe, so it exposed his collarbone and part of his chest, which was thick with hair just a few shades darker than on his head. That was... surprising. Not bad, just...

Joel cleared his throat. He indicated his locker along the far wall, Phillips head screwdriver acting as an extended pointer finger. "Shorts and jammies are in there. Help yourself to whatever fits."

"Thanks, man."

Mike vanished behind the nearby partition, which only incidentally served as a privacy screen, Joel realized. He felt a faint wave of relief at that: he didn't know how he'd handle things if Mike went and disrobed in front of him.

"You left a bunch of your stuff here when you escaped," Mike continued from behind the partition, to the sound of terrycloth dropping to the floor and _ohgod_ \-- "...so I kinda just added a bunch of it to my own wardrobe. Did you used to work somewhere called 'Valley Forge'?"

"Huh? Oh. No, that's, uh, from _Silent Running_. _Valley Forge_ is the name of the ship Bruce Dern is on, the one he tries piloting into deep space but then the ship's forests start dying, just like the real biosphere went and did, only in the movie it was..." Joel trailed off, realizing all too late that he was babbling. He couldn't stop wondering if Mike was hairy _all over_. "Anyway, I have it on tape somewhere," he finished weakly.

"It's a cool shirt, anyway," Mike said, as though he hadn't heard a bit of that. There was a snap of elastic. "Hey, can you give me a hand back here?"

"Um."

* * *

Eventually the bedclothes situation got sorted out, and without Joel glimpsing anything he wasn't mentally prepared for. Joel excused himself to go tuck the bots in for the night and to brush his teeth, and returned to find Mike already settled into bed on his side, facing the wall, in an abundantly clear gesture of 'no more visiting, time to sleep now.'

Joel couldn't find it in him to be put off by this, with how tired he was himself. He dimmed the cabin lights, burrowed into his makeshift bed on the floor, and let the silence in.

And that worked, for about ten seconds, before Joel's ears tuned to the sound of Mike's breathing.

It wasn't that he was noisy. It was soft, normal, regular at-rest breathing, the kind that clearly indicated the breather was still awake even as he was lying in bed. But it had been years since Joel had even existed in the same space as another breathing creature. In that respect, the sound was deafening.

Not so much as the pounding of his own heart, though, as the minutes ticked by and Joel's mind kept racing. Each steady inhale heard from the area of Joel's bed reminded him that someone was occupying it. Someone who wasn't him; who seemed friendly and easy-going and at least understood Joel's isolation in all its particulars...

 _Just ask him,_ the very un-zenlike part of Joel's brain prodded. Joel swallowed and debated pulling the covers over his head.

Mike was only a few feet away. But in the dark with no other stimulus Joel's senses were running hot, picking up the other man's every twitch and sigh, in such tremendous clarity that it was like Joel was lying right beside him; on top of him; inhabiting him.

 _You could be,_ that unbidden part of Joel's mind urged. _Just_ ask _him._

After almost an hour wound up like this, his face pressed into his pillow, Joel couldn't take it any longer. He lifted his head and looked over toward the bed.

Mike, it turned out, had also changed position, having rolled onto his back at some point. He lay with his hands laced over his stomach, blinking at the ceiling.

That was it. All at once, the butterflies in Joel's stomach melted and solidified into cast iron. He picked himself up from his makeshift bed and, without a sound, came to sit at the edge of Mike's (normally his) bunk.

In the low light of the cabin, Joel saw Mike's head tilt toward him. "Hey," his companion mumbled, his voice viscous but not sleep-worn, proof that he'd been awake this entire time as well.

"Do you mind?" Joel asked softly, without preamble.

He didn't need to say anything else, it seemed. Wordlessly, Mike pushed himself up onto his elbow and pulled back the comforter, yielding a space on the bed and also revealing his body -- which was paler and softer than Joel might have expected but certainly still relatively fit for his age, with that thick scruff of hair running across the expanse of his chest and down to his navel. He hadn't managed to fit into any of Joel's PJs and so had sufficed for a pair of the other man's boxers, cutting a dark line across his lower belly where a second thick trail of hair tapered.

If Joel were being objective just then, he'd note to himself that Mike was not quite the golden-haired Adonis of his imagination. But Joel -- if he thought about it at all -- regarded his sexuality in pretty casual terms, and anyway, it had been five (maybe six) years.

He climbed in, and Mike pulled the insulating blanket over them both.

"So how do we..." Mike murmured. Lying facing each other in the too-small bed, his breath brushed Joel's cheek, then the side of his throat. He still smelled faintly of mouthwash.

Joel answered the question for him by reaching between their bodies and sliding his hand beneath the elastic of Mike's boxers. Mike's breathing hitched. His hands found Joel's shoulders and his mouth (and teeth) found Joel's throat.

Joel made a noise that should have been a soft moan but came out sounding more like a squeak.


	3. Day 2

**Day 2**

The sun was peeking through the heatshields of the cabin window when Mike woke, sprawled on his stomach and alone in bed.

He drew a long breath, smelling unfamiliar aftershave with faint notes of cannabis, and didn't entirely process the meaning of any of it. As he continued to wake up, Mike stretched along the complete length of the bunk, ankles popping as his toes brushed the far inset wall. In his own bunk, in his own time, his feet would have brushed the curling corners of his magazine clippings, cutouts of Pamela Anderson-type bodies with Heather Locklear heads... but instead, his toes met the bare, brushed metal of the interior hull.

_Oh. Dang._

The events of the last 36-or-so hours -- and the events of last night in particular -- came rushing back to him in an instant. Mike buried his head into his pillow (which, he realized now, was Joel-scented) and held back a groan.

_So that really happened._

Not just the rutting-like-a-couple-of-desperate-teenagers bit, although that weighed heavily on recent events, for sure. But even everything before that -- the time slippage, the crash, the end of the project. Where were Tom and Crow -- _his_ Tom and Crow, the ones he'd been through everything of the last five (hundred) years with? Did they even exist anymore, now that he'd gone back and ended up here on the SOL before he was even supposed to meet them? If he slipped through time and space again, would _this_ continuity still exist?

_And by the way, you slept with Joel Robinson._

Mike let out a moan like a sick child, pushing his face even further into the pillow and pulling Joel's comforter over his head like he might disappear beneath it.

The thing was, he didn't _really_ regret it. Joel was the first fully human lifeform Mike had been in close proximity with for years. Nuveena didn't really count, and anyway she had been... weird. Ethereal, with all that dancing and teleporting about. And Pearl Forrester definitely didn't count, the contents of Mike's nightmares notwithstanding. She was just too evil to be real.

By contrast, Joel's presence was, for lack of a better word, solid. He occupied real space. Even being in the same room with him was enough to make Mike's pulse quicken. And one fumbling handjob in the dark wasn't about to go and reverse all that. It was just...

...It was just that Joel was so cool. A made man, freelance pyrotechnician and manager of a Hot Fish Shop -- well, in a few years, anyway. But nevertheless a dispenser of zen and an alumnus of the Satellite of Love. Heck, the _only_ alumnus. He was the man-shaped void that Mike had been trying to fill for five years. Mike was _wearing the guy's socks_ , for crying out loud. Although not right that second, seeing as they were in the wash.

The point was, Mike respected the hell out of Joel, both the man and the legacy he'd left behind when he escaped the station. And hopping into bed with him changed everything. Not for Joel maybe -- from his perspective, Mike was just a recent acquaintance with whom he'd quickly hit it off -- but on Mike's end of things, it was a pretty dramatic left turn into oncoming traffic.

They probably ought to talk about this. Heck, they ought to have talked about it _before having sex_ , but there was no going back on that one now. The least they could do was be a couple of grown men about this and sort this thing out before it got weird.

Well. Weird _er_.

* * *

Crow T. Robot was staring at Joel's neck.

More precisely, he was staring at the thick-ribbed black turtleneck Joel had elected to wear under his jumpsuit today. Which was uncomfortably warm, Joel had to admit, but probably not quite as uncomfortable as the little gold robot's gaze, which seemed to grow more _accusatory_ all the time. Or maybe that was Joel's imagination.

Either way, he kept filing. Crow had asked him a week ago for help smoothing the plastic nubs off his new train model, and Joel liked to keep his promises. Besides, Crow had gotten so adept at putting the motors and gears in with just his beak, if Joel could help out by filing parts and applying decals, it was worth it to see the little bot's artificial heart fill with joy.

Except there wasn't much joy today. Just suspicion. And cold, yellow-eyed stares.

"So whatcha think of our new guest, Crow?" Joel tried in an effort to break the silence.

"Ehh..." Crow's faceplate couldn't exactly furrow, but if it could, it would be scrutinizing the edge of Joel's turtleneck with extra intensity. "I wish he'd leave."

"Why's that?"

"I don't know, he just _bugs_ me. And he smells like cheese curds."

_Not after a shower, he didn't,_ Joel specifically did _not_ say out loud.

"That's not a nice thing to say," Joel scolded gently instead. "And besides, you've never even had cheese curds, so how would you know?"

"Well, he's still terrible!" Crow decided, raising his voice. "He likes the Packers and he's from the future and I don't know why you let him stay in your room when you tell me and Servo we're old enough to sleep on our own!"

This time, Joel's face flushed. "Well, see, uh, Mike and I need the climate control because we're human beings, and..."

Crow hopped up and down in a huff, his model freighter completely forgotten on the desk. "That's not it at all!" he protested. "There's something else going on and I hate it!"

"Now, look, mister--" Joel began, starting to stammer. "I know you think everything's-- everything feels like it's changing all at once around here, but Mike and I--"

Behind them, the door to the bridge swished open. Joel looked over his shoulder and felt his stomach do an interesting set of Olympic-level gymnastics as his gaze fell upon no one less than the man himself.

"...Hi," Mike said, frozen in place in the doorway.

He was dressed in one of Joel's old spare jumpsuits, one of the ones that went all the way down to the ankle rather than stopping at the knee. Joel had switched away from those after realizing Cambot never recorded his feet anyway and it made walking around on the bridge that much more comfortable. But the full-length style looked pretty good on Mike. Then again, Joel reminded himself, most things probably would, like that black and white sailor number he had stashed in a locker somewhere...

Belatedly, Joel realized his mouth was still hanging open and shut it.

"Oh, hey," he managed a second later. His cheeks were still pink and, in the circumstances, probably weren't going to return to normal any time soon.

This was... well, weird timing. Did Mike come here to talk, or was he just passing through? --Which was a silly question, the bridge was in the foremost section of the ship, he _had_ to have come here to talk. And that meant he'd been thinking about last night. And that was just about the last thing Joel wanted to have a serious conversation about right now.

Crow, standing at elbow level between the two men, glanced from Joel's face to Mike's and burst out sobbing, racing out of the room.

Mike witnessed this scene with faint alarm but ducked out of the way to let the robot pass. Behind him, the door of the bridge drew shut, leaving him and Joel (and Cambot, still in standby mode in a corner) alone.

"Uh," Mike managed.

Joel hid a cringe. He glanced back at the desk to sort Crow's unfinished model parts into a neat pile for a moment and when he turned back he had regained his lazy, amiable smile, or some approximation thereof. He'd sort things out with his robot later; right now he had company.

"Sleep okay?" he asked his... well, 'guest' was no longer the proper word, was it? 'Companion'? 'Partner' was definitely too strong...

"Oh. Yeah. Thanks." Mike reached an arm back to scratch at the back of his neck, his ill-fitting loaner jumpsuit tightening in certain unfortunate (and one or two very fortunate) places. His gaze fell on Joel's turtleneck. "Sorry, uh, should've asked if you were okay with that..."

"Nah, it's fine. It doesn't hurt." In point of fact, when Joel saw the mark in the mirror that morning he couldn't help a flush of fiendish excitement. Well, before going beet red with embarrassment. Grownups were supposed to be beyond that whole hickey phase, after all. "Just didn't want to get any questions from the bots... you know how it is."

"Is he gonna be okay?" Mike asked, tilting his head toward the door. "Crow in my time was a bit more, uh... up to speed on this stuff. Also he got a different bowling pin."

"Really? Boy, that's a relief," Joel confessed. Well, the bowling pin part was confusing, but it just meant his little man was growing up. Probably. "I know I gotta tell 'em about the facts of life _some_ time, but I just... can't ever seem to get around to it. I don't know if I ever do or what, but... thanks for looking after them after I'm gone, you know?"

"They're good guys," Mike assured him, nodding. A spot of parental pride swelled in Joel's chest. "But, you know, I think the questions part is gonna come up sooner or later. That's why I wanted to..."

Oh, darn.

"Yeah... yeah," Joel agreed, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "I know. So we should probably, uh..."

"Yeah, you know, just to..."

"...I mean if you didn't want to--"

"--Oh, no, I mean, as long as you're okay with it--"

"--being up in space for so long, I was just--"

"--totally understand if you--"

They both stopped, realizing they were completely speaking over one another now. Mike held up a hand to start over.

"I just," he said firmly, "wanna avoid getting into something complicated, you know? That's all."

"Oh, that's easy enough," Joel replied, relaxing as he leaned back against the desk. "I'm not into complicated."

Which was very, very true. Not simply because of Joel's complexes resulting from all the single-father sitcoms he watched as a kid, but because for as large as the Satellite of Love was, it was way too small for something as messy as _dating_. Mike was handsome in a love-handles sort of way, he had big warm hands, and he was easy to talk to... but that was all that Joel was looking for. Not a mortgage and a joint tax return. No, keeping this straight-forward (hah) was probably for the best.

That all seemed to be fine with Mike, or would be, eventually.

"So... just keep things casual?" Mike suggested, lowering his hand again. Beneath the jumpsuit, Joel saw his shoulders start to relax, but there was still a wrinkle of uncertainty in his expression.

"Yeah. That's okay, isn't it?"

"Oh... yeah," said Mike. The way his brow knotted said otherwise, but Joel left it alone for now. Mike could probably get up to speed on things soon enough. "That's fine by me. Casual is great. You know, 'cause I don't know how long before I'll come unstuck in time again anyway..."

"Well, don't be in a hurry there," Joel said, bearing him a coy smile. He tilted his head to one side, looking up at Mike with a half-lidded gaze. With his neck exposed, the red mark on his throat was just barely visible beneath his turtleneck. "I mean, as long as you're around..."

Mike's eyes fixed firmly on that spot on Joel's neck, and Joel saw the adam's apple in his throat do a little dance. The sight of this made Joel's chest feel all bubbly -- he wasn't used to being stared at like this; wasn't even used to having this level of body language to share with someone. It was so thrilling Joel wouldn't entirely have minded if Mike closed the space between them right now and, say, pinned him against the desk--

"There you two are!" Gypsy shrilled, the door to the bridge swishing open again.

Joel immediately straightened up. Then took a seat on a near stool, conscious of the way his imagination had managed to get ahead of him again. Mike, it seemed, was not much better, backing away from the doorway to give Gypsy a wide berth as her long, cable-like body slithered into the room.

"Oh... hi, Gypsy," Joel mumbled.

Ignoring her creator for a moment, she turned her attention to the ship's guest, sizing Mike up in a quick up and down glance. She had only briefly been introduced to Mike yesterday, during her afternoon system maintenance check, but that was all the time she needed to apparently get used to him.

"I'm cleaning up the storage in Dock 14 today and I need an extra pair of hands," she declared. "And here I find you guys hoarding all the hands!"

"Aw, sorry, Gypsy," Mike told her, hunching forward a little in order to be closer to her present eye level. It was an amazingly adorable gesture, Joel thought. "How 'bout I come help you out?"

"Well... all right! You're nice and strapping," Gypsy decided. She turned abruptly in place and began to slide back down the corridor. "Now come on! Day's a-wastin'!"

Mike hesitated before following, looking up and exchanging a brisk smile with Joel, who shrugged.

"Guess boating'll have to wait till tomorrow," Joel said, as casually as if their preceding conversation had never happened. "Have fun, you kids."

On that note, Joel reminded himself as the bridge door slid shut behind Mike's reluctant back, he should probably go have that chat with Crow now. Before the gold bot went and shared his fears with Tom and got the whole ship in a furor about what was really a very simple thing, this business between Joel and Mike.

Yep. Totally simple.

* * *

Mike lost count of the crates after the first thirty or so. Individually they weren't too heavy, but Gypsy's constant indecisiveness over where to move them meant Mike ended up hauling some of them two or three times before she was satisfied.

Finally, though, either Dock 14 was starting to resemble something organized or Gypsy remembered her hired help required food, because she whistled to him from the catwalk to break for lunch.

Mike loosed a final groan, letting a box full of rainbow slinkies fall atop one of the dozen cases of ginger root tea. Straightening up, he procured a hanky (actually, Joel's again) from a pocket to wipe some of the sweat and dust caked over his face and neck.

"Phew! Been a while since you gave me a workout like that, Gyps," Mike remarked, fanning himself with the same drenched fabric. He craned his head back, finding her silhouette up near the entrance of the loft. "I mean, future you."

"Really?" Gypsy dropped the feather duster she had been holding between her lips, allowing it to tumble down the stairs back where the rest of her body was coiled. "Why did I stop?"

"I think because I always got lost if you ordered me to go someplace," Mike admitted.

"That makes sense," Gypsy agreed, without appearing to put any further thought into it.

"Hey, any chance of some lemonade...?"

While Gypsy went to procure a drink for her hard worker, Mike leaned against a stack of Conair curling irons and let his gaze wander. Despite efforts on Gypsy's part to put the dock in some kind of logical order, the sheer cultural detritus of the assorted junk on this station never failed to stagger him. Boxes of processed cheese dip butting up against 213 cases of Micro Machines assembly line cast-offs next to two cubic tons of Best of Jeff Foxworthy tapes... Mike just couldn't figure out what Clayton Forrester had intended to do with all of it.

Maybe he would always be better off not knowing. Besides, half the crates were probably labeled incorrectly to start with, like--

"Hamdingers!"

In an instant, Mike shot off of the case of curling irons. He dropped his hanky and sought through towering stacks of boxed industrial fittings and expired weather balloons, coming at last to a massive wooden crate with the label he had spotted. It was easily three times his height, emblazoned with that single, uniquely unappealing word like an enormous, grotesque version of the boarded-up Ark of the Covenant.

It was _here_. It was _still here._ He had forgotten, in the rush of everything that had gone on, just where in time he had landed, and what that _meant_.

Wasting no time, Mike found a crowbar left over from Gypsy's tool kit and dragged over a ladder. The top of the Hamdingers crate gave away easily from its rotten nails, but when Mike hefted it there was too much weight to slide it easily aside. Finally, he managed to lift the wood enough to get the beam of a flashlight into the box's interior.

_There it was._ A single, spheroid escape pod, its outriggers and thrusters still with the pull-tabs in them, and the pod's name, _Deus ex Machina_ , spray painted across the hull in runny block letters. This was the vessel that Joel would one day use to escape the station, leaving the bots behind, and leaving Mike at the mercy of Forrester and TV's Frank... But that wasn't how it had to play out this time, was it?

Some very large gears in Mike's head started turning.

"Mike? Mike, are you back here?"

Behind him, Gypsy weaved her serpentine body through the narrow passage between stacks of crates, barely avoiding toppling all of them. From her lower jaw hung a cute wicker picnic basket containing what Mike guessed was his lemonade, along with sandwiches, maybe.

"'Hamdingers'?" she read, upon seeing the massive container. "Oh no-- so you really _are_ from Wisconsin!"

"Ah--" Mike abandoned his crowbar and descended back down the ladder. "No, you got the wrong idea, Gyps. See, it's..."

Here, he hesitated. Should he really be showing his full hand at this point? What if he couldn't even get the thing operational? And even supposing that he did, what if he couldn't convince Joel and the bots to come with him? It was the only escape pod listed on the manifest, so if he used it on himself, he'd be stranding everyone else, and he couldn't do that...

_Joel's pretty handy,_ Mike reminded himself. _He could probably build his own escape pod, and he knows Forrester sabotaged the instruments now, so..._

But that just didn't seem a satisfactory excuse at all. Mike worried his lip. If nothing else, he ought to at least figure out how many people the pod could fit before letting everyone know about this thing.

"Uh, you got me," he told Gypsy instead, spreading his arms. "Guess I was feeling kinda homesick."

"No one should be _that_ homesick," Gypsy said firmly. She leaned forward with her mouth wide, allowing Mike to retrieve the picnic basket from her lips. "Here! I brought real home-made sandwiches. With the crusts off!"

"You're the best, Gypsy," Mike said, already with his mouth full. Deep questions regarding his impending escape could wait -- these sandwiches had real mayo on them.

"D'aww." Gypsy dipped her head in feigned bashfulness, long curled eyelashes drifting over her single eye. "Any friend of Joel's is a friend of mine! And you _are_ Joel's very special friend, am I right?"

Mike swallowed a too-large lump of tuna on rye and coughed, reaching for his lemonade.

"Uh, don't know what you mean, Gypsy," he managed, once he was able to breathe again.

"Aw, you don't need to be shy about it, Mike silly. A woman notices these things!" She weaved closer to Mike with her head canted to the side, as though in a conspiratorial whisper, though her voice never dropped. "Plus I found Crow crying in an air vent earlier and kind of put two and two together."

"Oh."

"It's nothing to be ashamed of, you know!" Gypsy continued. "We're in the Nineties now. There's no reason you and Joel can't be out and proud about your relationship!"

Oh _god_.

"Look, uh, Gypsy, I think you got the wrong idea," Mike said, the rest of his sandwich forgotten for the moment. "Joel and I just met each other, remember?"

_Yeah,_ came a snide voice in the back of Mike's head, _remember?_

"But don't you like Joel?" Gypsy asked, sounding disappointed.

"Sure, I... I mean yeah, he's a good friend..."

"So there you go then!"

"Hold on, there's a lot more to-- to--"

Mike stammered helplessly, as he realized that for as low as Gypsy's criteria for compatibility was, he and Joel had set their own bar even lower. Heck, it would've been _better_ if they had started out as friends, and not just 'two warm bodies who happen to be inhabiting the same space station.'

Not that he regretted it. He was definitely not allowing himself to regret it. And anyway, geez, they'd both been desperate for a little companionship. It was just that he had no leg to stand on in this argument, and Gypsy probably knew it. She always had been the smartest.

"Look, just don't tell Tom and Crow, okay?" he said at last, arms dropping to his sides in surrender. "They're gonna find out eventually, so let me and Joel just... ease them into it, all right?"

"Of course, Mike," Gypsy answered, in that tone which suggested this was a promise to be broken in about five minutes, if that. "But just know that we'll all support you when you finally decide to come out of the closet!"

* * *

_"Please stop holding. Your call is extremely unimportant to us. Please hang up and stop wasting both your time and ours."_

Joel sighed. He was resting on his elbows on the desk of the bridge, chin cupped in his hands. On the far wall, the triangular forward viewscreen continued to show a static image of Deep 13's logo, with a looping muzak number carefully tuned to be grating rather than pleasant.

Frank had put him on hold over 20 minutes ago, but it was in Joel's nature to be exceptionally patient, so it didn't even occur to him to end the call. Besides, that's just what the Mads wanted, probably.

Behind him, Joel heard the door of the bridge sliding open.

"Oh hey, I was looking fo--"

Joel looked up in time to see Mike's eyes triple in size, the color draining from his face as he caught sight of the viewscreen over Joel's shoulder. The rest of his sentence dissolving into a stutter, Mike bolted for the starboard side of the bridge, trying to evade Cambot's field of vision.

"Whoa, it's okay, it's okay! I'm on hold," Joel assured him, waving him back over. He did not even straighten up from his slouch.

Mike reappeared a moment later, straightening his jumpsuit and side-eying Cambot's lens warily. He had a small clump of dust in his hair, but Joel decided not to mention it.

"I thought maybe we should try getting some answers on your whole coming-unstuck-in-time thing," Joel explained instead, nodding toward the monitor. "Vonnegut didn't pick up the phone, so I called Pinky and the Brain."

"Huh. Yeah, that's a good idea," Mike managed, still looking pale. "Still, uh... you mind not letting them know you've got a guest? The one _good_ thing about this time travel has been no more awful movies."

Joel nodded thoughtfully, eyes falling closed. "I feel ya, buddy," he said solemnly. "I bet we could all do with no more bad movies."

"Yeah," said Mike. His tone adopted a new, nervous tenor. "About that..."

"Oh, before I forget," Joel said abruptly, lifting his head. He opened his eyes in time to see Mike's mouth clamp anxiously shut. "I found Crow earlier. He's fine. We had a nice long talk."

"That's, uh, that's good," Mike ventured.

"Yeah, and Tommy's been watching cartoon musicals all day, so he doesn't have a clue," Joel continued. "So our 'scandalous secret' is safe, for now."

"Oh, er, that's great." Mike's ears seemed pinker than they had been a moment ago. "Yeah, Gypsy is... Gypsy's doing fine too."

"You have any idea when you wanna tell them?"

"Um. Shouldn't we first figure out _what_ we're going to te--"

On the far wall of the bridge, the static image of Deep 13's logo was knocked aside, revealed to actually be a print-out on a thin piece of posterboard. A familiar lackadaisical voice rang, "Hello, Deep 13, TV's Frank speaking..."

Mike made a noise like a strangled squirrel and hit the deck again -- this time, straight down, to the only hiding place which was near to hand: beneath the desk. Joel wobbled and nearly fell from his chair as Mike banged against his knees, forcing him to lean forward and hang onto the surface of the desk for stability.

"Jake? Did I catch you at a bad time?" Frank drawled, his lone spit-curl drooping especially close to his eyebrows today.

"It's, uh, Joel," Joel managed, adjusting himself in his chair so that he was neither falling off the edge nor crushing Mike's face with his knees. There was not, in fact, so much room beneath the desk to hide a grown man comfortably, and near as Joel could tell Mike's head was presently jammed up between his thighs. "Uh, I had a question for your better half about time travel?"

* * *

"What's on your mind, my little pearblossom highway?" Dr. Clayton Forrester intoned, with a sneer so textured it practically counted as its own character.

Mike squeezed his eyes shut and tried to focus on neither the long-dead voice of his one-time captor _nor_ the fact that in his haste he had ended up huddled eye-level with Joel's groin. He leaned as far back against the wall of the desk as possible, but it wasn't really far enough.

"Hi, sir," came Joel's answer from above the desk, sounding as unruffled as he always did. How he managed that, Mike didn't know, but he was beginning to believe it was a kind of superpower. "Suppose someone leaves a geostationary orbit on a collision course for Earth and falls into a rift between time and space causing him to leap quantumly from one parallel universe to another, what can he do to stabilize himself?"

"That's an... oddly specific question, Joel," Forrester said slowly. Beneath the desk, Mike cringed. "To what do I owe this sudden interest in the field of Bakulaology?"

"Oh, nothing really," Joel replied easily. He readjusted himself on his stool, a normally subtle action that from Mike's vantage point was considerably more graphic. "Just a regular ol' thought experiment. So what's the answer?"

"Well!" Predictably, Forrester couldn't pass up an opportunity to lecture, so with only that small bit of prompting he readily launched into an infodump. Mike decided now was a good time to try breathing. "This is only _hypothetically speaking,_ of course, but provided this someone was indeed moving back and forth in time and space, not just in our universe but in adjacent, parallel universes as well, it stands to reason he or she had been converted into a body of particles at the fifth or higher dimension, thus enabling phasic travel between m-spaces..."

"Uh-huh."

"Holding a bowl of oranges during the cardinal hours of the day should be sufficient in grounding the fifth-dimensional being in their current time-space intersection, unless of course they're on the eleventh or higher dimension, in which case..."

A bead of sweat rolled past Mike's temple. In addition to being cramped in the extreme, the space beneath the desk was quickly beginning to steam up. He stuck a hand up to try to wipe his brow, but in doing so accidentally brushed his fingers against Joel's bare calf, causing the latter to jerk as if ticklish. Mike even heard Joel's voice stumble for a moment.

"S-so how come it's or-oranges for dimensions--" Joel cleared his throat "--five through ten, and pears from eleven until whatever?"

"The reason is _math_ , poopie brain! Now pay attention: I've drawn us a chart..."

In any other situation, Mike could have been persuaded to be devious right now. Here he was, hiding under the desk between the legs of a man he was maybe-kinda-technically involved with, and now he knew where the guy was ticklish. Or if slapstick wasn't on the agenda, Mike could always try to be sexy and reenact one of those 'office hijinks' stories which peppered his porn mags back at home.

But none of that was coming to him at the moment. Mainly he was concentrating on trying not to breathe too loudly.

"I trust your scientific curiosity has been sated now?" Forrester concluded finally, after what seemed like two or three eternities.

"Are you sure you didn't make a lot of that up?" Joel asked doubtfully, with all the gormless innocence of a schoolboy.

"Of course not!" Forrester barked defensively. "I happened to minor in theoretical nefarious time travel back in college, in between the five other things I minored in."

"Say Joel," TV's Frank chimed in. "What's with that turtleneck? You got yourself a girrrrlfriend?"

Joel's right knee twitched again, subtly. _That's an interesting tell,_ Mike thought. He'd have to remember that one.

"Don't be ridiculous, Frank," Forrester cut in brusquely, before Joel could reply. "Who's he going to date up there, one of his robots? Joel's as committed to the experiments as we are, aren't you, my dusty chinchilla?"

"Whatever you say, Doctor Forrester," Joel replied amiably.

"That didn't sound very committed, Robinson," said Forrester, his tone taking a turn toward the menacing. "If I were you I'd shape up while you still can, or next week's stinker with Joe Don Baker will be the last steamer you ever whiffed."

_Joe Don Baker?_ Mike repeated in his head, mouthing the name.

It percolated through his thoughts like juice through fat for a split-second before the answer spat itself straight into his prefrontal cortex.

_Mitchell!!_

Mike stood up at once, forgetting completely in that moment that his head had a clearance of about half an inch. He banged it into the underside of the desk, crown of his skull splitting with pain as above him the desk's plywood made a sickening crack and model train pieces went scattering across its surface.

Mike opened his mouth to yelp and instead found himself with a faceful of Joel's jumpsuit, as the latter crossed his legs around him and forced him back down onto his knees. His pained protests muffled against Joel's crotch, Mike flailed with his arms and tried to fight his way out of the choke hold, which resulted only in Joel pushing back _harder_ in order to keep him grounded.

"All right over there, Joel?" Forrester inquired.

"Must be my restless leg syndrome acting up!" Joel reported, somehow managing to sound sleepy even as he raised his voice to drown out Mike's shouting. "Anyway, thanks a lot Doctor F, see you in a few days! Okay bye!"

The instant the viewscreen whined with a terminated call, Joel released his thighs' death grip around Mike. The latter barreled forward, knocking Joel's stool out from under him and sending both of them tumbling, as a tangled mass of limbs, to the floor.

"Ow," Joel reported, moments later, as he began to extricate himself.

Mike, meanwhile, gasped for breath, trying to block the last 20 seconds or so from his memory. Except not all of it, because--

_"Mitchell!"_

"Hmm?" Joel hummed, beginning to pull himself to his feet.

Mike drew himself up as well, and once he did he grabbed Joel firmly by both shoulders, fixing him with an intense gaze.

"How many Joe Don Baker movies have you watched?" he demanded.

"Uh, none, I think. Why?"

"Then it's _Mitchell_. He's going to show you _Mitchell_. And that means...!"

It meant they had even less time than Mike had realized. He knew he must have arrived close to the time of Joel's departure, but to show up less than a _week_ before he was supposed to use the escape pod and quit the station? This meant he didn't have any time to lose in figuring out the pod's operation and to convince Joel and the bots to come with him. It meant--

"Boy, you're pretty worked up," said Joel, eyes alert behind their droopy eyelids. Casually, without any real pressure applied, he pushed his thumbs into the soft sides of Mike's wrists and released Mike's hold on his shoulders. "Relax, the movie's not going anywhere. How 'bout we pay a visit to the greenhouse for a while, huh?"

"But it's _Mitchell_ \-- Wait, you have a greenhouse?"

* * *

"Target sighted," Gypsy announced not half an hour later, as she peered through the eyepiece of the bridge's interdeck periscope. "Boys confirmed to be sharing a funny pipe and starting to giggle!"

"Ah, good ol' reliable Joel," Tom said knowledgeably, buried deep in his piles of notes. "His methods may be unconventional, but they sure get the job done."

"What job?" Crow countered. He was still sniffly from his episode earlier and his optics were red and puffy, which made them difficult to swivel in their casing.

"The job of _romance_ , dear Crow!" Tom answered readily, peering over his reading glasses. "That is the subject of today's inaugural meeting for Club What Is Up With This Mike Guy Anyway -- which I will now call to order!"

At this point a gavel may have been smacked, if any of the robots had functioning hands. Instead, Gypsy quietly raised the periscope and joined Crow and Servo huddled around the desk.

"Gentlebots, I've studied the matter extensively," Tom declared, hovering back and forth among his copious notes, "and it seems to me that our progenitor and provider, one Joel Robinson, being a human in the prime of his life and in need of a mate--"

"Wait, a _mate?_ " Crow interjected. "I thought we were talking about this Mike character."

"--mate or _companion_ ," Tom ground out, swiveling his beak irritably toward the larger bot, "and having been out of the human world for ever so many years as to become completely unacclimatized toward other members of his species--"

"I think he's doing a great job," Gypsy spoke up. "Did you notice he's caring more about his appearance and combed his hair this morning? And I even saw him with a thing of Tic-Tacs!"

"Order! Order! Order!" Servo shouted, glasses askew as he hovered furiously to and fro. "I'm club president here! The floor will open for questions at the end of the presentation! Now pipe down and let me finish!"

Crow's bowling pin parted to make a retort, simply on principle, but a glance from Gypsy compelled him to shut it again. Tom heaved a sigh, tilting his glasses back into place with the help of the side of the desk, and continued.

"Look, it's very simple," he said. "Joel's a human. Mike's a human. He might not be the _best_ human, but he's what we've got to work with. Anyway, Joel seems to like him."

On this point, Crow and Gypsy nodded firmly in agreement.

"But we can't just leave it up to Joel to figure it all out!" Tom went on. "Joel is shy and sensitive and struggles with taking initiative in his own life."

There was more firm nodding.

"And that's why _we_ have to help him!" Tom maintained. "Just nudge him in the right direction a little. A bit of mood lighting, a romantic dinner, a musical number reasserting patriarchal values about the nuclear family..."

At this, Crow piped up again. "Hang on. Servo, what kind of 'research' did you do on this stuff anyway?"

Despite his previous outburst, Servo allowed this new interruption. "Why, all the classics!" he answered, indicating his stacks of notes. " _Lady and the Tramp_ , _Beauty and the Beast_ , _The Little Mermaid_..."

"I knew it," Crow groaned, eyes rolling toward the ceiling. "Servo, those are all kids' movies!"

"They're _family_ movies, Crow! _Family!_ " Tom insisted loudly. "Do you guys _like_ being the product of a single-parent household? This is our opportunity to avoid name-calling on the playground forever!"

"But Mike is a..." Gypsy began.

"I know, I know, he's from Wisconsin," Tom agreed solemnly. "And we'll have to bear that badge of shame with dignity and perseverance, even as the older kids tease us mercilessly for our generic clothes and our fish fry sack lunches. The younger kids won't understand our parents' love and will ask us naive yet nevertheless hurtful questions about our humble, farm-bred origins. Cows will try to befriend us wherever we go..."

"Ehn, you're really not selling us on this, Tom," said Crow.

"But don't you see! We'll have a mom!" Servo enthused.

"Hey, you're right!" Crow lit up immediately. "I always wanted one of those!"

"Actually he'd be more like a second dad," Gypsy corrected. "I don't think it's appropriate to apply heteronormative relationship dynamics onto--"

"Precisely, my gold-toned friend!" Tom raved, ignoring Gypsy's interjection completely. "And that's why we need to get Joel and Mike together as soon as possible!"

"I think they already _are_ together," Gypsy mumbled.

This remark, rather than going unheard like the last one, was met with immediate scoffing and chuckling from Crow and Servo.

"Unlike you, Gypsy, Servo and I have spent the last five and a half _years_ studying human behavior every week," Crow told her with an air of superiority, beak jutting out proudly. "I _think_ we know what signs to look for to tell whether two people are you-know-what-ing or not."

"Uh-huh," Gypsy deadpanned.

"Right, and it can't go anywhere until there's a kiss," Tom agreed. He leaned onto the stack of notes to clumsily drag out a rather large, complicated diagram from the middle of the pile. "And lucky for us, _I_ have a plan."


	4. Day 3

**Day 3**

Joel's idea of going boating in the ship's reservoir was decidedly less picturesque than Mike had expected.

The reservoir itself occupied an almost entirely unlit section of the steerage deck directly under the desalination plant, and was less like a lake and more like a deep, black pool. Mike couldn't honestly tell if the water was actually clear or not -- the first thing Joel told him when they cast off was that touching the water with his hands would contaminate it, and they could only go boating on it at all because he'd sterilized the boat and paddle in advance.

Still, apart from these setbacks, once they were a good distance from the maintenance gangway it _was_ kinda nice. The reservoir was a perfectly still and self-contained body of water, held in a part of the satellite so otherwise desolate that Joel and Mike's voices boomed magnificently against the distant walls. Mike could almost believe they were the only ones on the entire station, like this.

"Sometimes I come down here to do some pretend fly fishing," Joel said, reclining back on the lightly padded plank which served as his seat. "It's not perfect, 'cos the water's always so calm. Once I tried introducing some big fans to simulate a current but all that did was get water leaking all over the engineering deck..."

"You do a lot of fishing back home?" Mike asked as he mirrored Joel's posture, such that their knees nearly met in the center.

The boat had a relatively shallow keel, the bottom of its fiberglass hull wide enough that two adults could probably fit side-by-side on the floor without jamming elbows into each other's ribs. Presently it contained Joel's gimmick tackle box and the six-pack Joel had allowed Mike to bring along, on the condition that he didn't toss the empty cans over the side.

"Oh yeah, every spring," Joel answered keenly. "Before the big summer rush me and a couple of buddies would go up to this old trout river up near the border. The catch was always smaller but it beat having to steer clear of every weekend warrior with his mobile command bunker and eight screaming kids."

"Sounds nice. The, what you did, I mean," said Mike. "Me and my brother grew up in a small place with our folks, and there was a pretty good river nearby so we'd go every weekend. Never caught anything worth keeping."

"Heh! Aww."

This _was_ nice, Mike reflected, leaning further back so that his head rested on the transom board above the rudder. This close to the water line, he could feel even the boat's subtle rocking back and forth, to where if he closed his eyes he could nearly believe the two of them were on some placid lake somewhere. If he just had a pillow he could probably fall asleep right where he sat.

Not that Joel would let him, probably. After coming down from their high and heading back from the greenhouse last night, Joel had rolled the two of them into bed with nary a word of discussion between them and... well. Suffice to say, both men had improved dramatically over their previous performance. In fact, they were both so impressed with themselves that when they woke up in the morning they did it again.

 _A fellow could get used to a life like this,_ Mike thought, feeling the tension start to melt out of him as he exhaled.

 _Not that it can last,_ a needling little part of his brain reminded him, bringing his relaxation to a dead stop.

Mike peeled open his eyes and sat up, almost too quickly. He balanced himself on the sides of the boat as it swayed bow to stern.

"Joel," he said, and hung on the sound of that for a moment, wondering if he had actually said Joel's name aloud in front of him before. His tongue darted between his lips, which had gone dry at some point, and his knees brushed against the other man's as he sat closer. "About what I was saying yesterday..."

Mike trailed off, distracted by a sound coming from the far side of the reservoir, near the sanitation controls. It was a long, guttural _"uwwwaahh! uwwwwahhh!"_ like a cat throwing up into a megaphone.

"What the...?"

It died down after a moment and Mike shook his head, unsure if he had just hallucinated the entire noise. Joel hadn't even reacted.

"Um, about yesterday," Mike began again, and stopped. There was some low whistling noise now, like a soft breeze hitting tall grass.

A bad feeling started to creep up Mike's spine and he fell into silence. The quiet whistling continued and seemed to establish a rhythm. Then something he could swear were light drums, creating a baseline.

"Do you hear that?" Mike asked finally.

"Yeah, it's nice. Where's it coming from?" Joel wondered, still lounging against the bow.

"No idea..."

The seconds stretched out between them as the faint, barely-there rhythm picked up other instruments; a chorus of hums. It seemed to build for a while and then just leveled out, still at the edge of the men's hearing. Mike could swear he could almost place the melody, but--

"Hey," Joel asked abruptly, barely lifting his head enough to meet Mike's gaze with his heavy-lidded eyes. "Wanna do something?"

"I..." Mike could nearly see the train derailing in front of him. It was like a Lumiere film, except there was a weird soundtrack playing. "You mean right here?" he managed.

"Yeah," said Joel, still watching him carefully behind that sleep-clouded gaze of his.

It should have been easy enough to say no. Mike was still smarting in a few places from the morning's encore performance and here they were in a cheap boat in a pool filled with the ship's drinking water, with odd instrumental music and a dying bird squawking somewhere. Hardly the most arousing of circumstances. And there was the little matter of the upcoming _Mitchell_ changeover, which Mike still needed to broach with Joel somehow.

But Joel's eyes flashed something wicked and in an instant, Mike felt all the blood leave his head, due for some place south. He played with the top button of his jumpsuit.

"Better than pretend fly fishing," Mike decided, with a shrug.

Opposite him, Joel grinned and sat up at attention. "Lie back," he instructed, climbing forward and unzipping the front of his suit in one fluid movement.

Mike complied readily, the boat swaying beneath him as he sank down halfway between the seat and the floor, bent at an odd angle against the bench as Joel settled on top of him. Their hips met, and then there was a full-on _rush_ of heat, and friction, and hands, and lyrics, and--

Wait, lyrics?

_"There you see him,_  
Sitting there across the way.  
He don't got a lot to say  
But there's something about him..." 

_What,_ Mike mouthed, as the singing grew in volume or proximity or, horror of horrors, both.

_"And you don't know why,  
But you're dying to try,  
You wanna... kiss the boy."_

Above him, having gone completely rigid (in a bad way), Joel's face contorted with a dreadful realization. He paled, then flushed, then pushed himself back off of Mike and fumbled for his zipper. Mike followed suit in short order, but it was all too late.

_"Yes, you want him._  
Look at him, you know you do.  
It's obvious he wants you too.  
So just go 'head and ask him.  
It don't take a word,  
Not a single word.  
Go on and... kiss the boy." 

"Oh, no. No. _No,_ " Joel told the singers, who were only now beginning to appear across the water, their empty gumball machine heads clustered on rubber dinghies like haunting, beak-mouthed barnacles. "Servo, you know darn well you don't have the license for this song!"

"Too bad, Joel!" Tom shouted from somewhere near the head of the fleet, just as the chorus started to swell. "It's a fanfic! Disney can't do anything about it!"

_"Sha-la-la-la-la-la_  
Don't be scared,  
We got the mood prepared,  
Go on and kiss the boy.  
Sha-la-la-la-la-la  
Don't stop now.  
Don't try to hide it how  
You wanna kiss the boy." 

"Wao, wao!" Crow crooned, sailing by on a near raft.

Mike stuck his face in his hands.

_"Sha-la-la-la-la-la_  
Joel you gotta play along.  
And obey this song.  
You gotta kiss the boy." 

"Wao wao!"

_"Sha-la-la-la-la-la"_

"Waaaaah-waaaaaaaaaaaaaah-waaah!" the strangled seagull -- or rather, Gypsy -- wailed, swinging overhead from her long cable like a treacherous robotic python.

_"Music play.  
This is the only way.  
You better kiss the boy!"_

_I'm dead,_ Mike decided. _I'm dead, the ship actually crashed with me on it and everything since then has been like_ Jacob's Ladder _only instead of a hot Puerto Rican lady my dying hallucinations are about having sex with the manager of a Hot Fish Shop, and now the curtain's pulled back and this is Hell and I'm not Tim Robbins at all which frankly is a relief but all the rest of it is just--_

Mike felt a pressure at his wrist, and snapped back to the present to find Joel gently guiding his hands away from his face.

"Whatever, you buncha jokers," Joel told the bots -- the squawking Crow and cawing Gypsy, but most of all the seemingly endless fleet of Servo chorusbots. "You wanna see a kiss? Here's a kiss!"

And that was all the warning Mike got before Joel leaned his face in.

But of course he would, of course to Joel the whole thing seemed simple and straight-forward. The fact that he and Mike hadn't kissed yet was a mere oversight and was easy enough to fix. Except from Mike's perspective, that approaching mouth meant something a lot, lot different.

He could have held it together and endured it. Instead, Mike's head went white with panic. He scrambled back on the bench at the stern of the boat, and Joel, not yet realizing something was wrong, just came closer. Mike backed up again, his hands grappling for purchase behind him. He caught only air.

The next moment, Mike's head met the water, and pretty much everything else went with him.

* * *

"...And stay in your rooms until you've thought long and hard about what you've done," Joel finished, less than an hour later when, at last, his talking-to with the bots had come to the close. He pulled a lever built into a side of the corridor, shutting Crow and Tom's bedroom doors in a snap (Gypsy needed to helm the ship and, anyway, Joel was convinced she had been tricked into helping to begin with). This done, he made an about-turn in his bed slippers and strode back toward his own cabin.

Mike was already there when Joel arrived, sitting with one leg bent at the edge of the bunk in Joel's dark green spare bathrobe, which might as well officially be his now, at the rate things were going. He sat with his back to the door and with a thick phonebook open in his lap, hunched forward to pore over the fine print listings.

"Planning on calling the folks?" Joel asked as the cabin door swished shut behind him.

Mike's back straightened. He flipped the phonebook shut with a soft _'whump'_ and half-turned, looking over his shoulder.

"Oh... yeah," he said, not sounding especially confident. Joel spotted a few worry-creases deepening around the edges of Mike's face, but didn't feel right calling him on it. "You put Sebastian and Flounder to bed already?"

"Yeah, I reminded them that while having a contaminated water supply might not be a big deal to _them_ , humans are about seventy percent made of the stuff and need it a lot more," Joel explained, pulling off the damp towel hung about his neck. He draped it off the back of a chair, next to Mike's. "Anyway, there's some bottled stuff for brushing your teeth while the filters cycle, but don't try using the shower for about twenty-four hours or so. Weird brown tar stuff will come out."

"Eugh," said Mike, making a face that mirrored Joel's sentiments. "Like in _Squirm_?"

"Huh?"

"Nevermind, you're better off not knowing." Mike rose from the edge of the bed, slipping the phone book as discreetly onto the edge of Joel's work bench as he could manage. Joel caught only part of the cover, but it seemed to be for the Twin Cities and outlying suburbs, not anywhere in Wisconsin. Also it was the yellow pages edition. "Well, anyway, I think we can survive. We did end up both kinda having a bath."

The two shared a chuckle, but it seemed to fade quickly. In the ensuing silence, Mike lifted a hand to rub at the back of his neck, gaze falling to the floor.

"Uh, sorry about freaking out back there," he muttered.

"Aw, hey, no, it was my fault, I went ahead and assumed stuff. I just thought it was kind of funny, like, y'know, why hadn't we?" Joel shrugged. "If you don't want to it's no big deal."

Mike was getting embarrassed and shifting his weight from one foot to the other again. It was cute, but Joel preferred when Mike was too incoherent to be ashamed of things. Besides, thanks to Servo's musical interlude back there, they never got to finish what they started in the boat.

"It's not that," Mike ground out, still taking an interest in his toes. "Or, maybe it is, I don't know. Kissing is, uh... serious, for me."

Right, and they had agreed on not getting into something serious. That made sense, and it didn't really bother Joel either way, although he suspected most of Mike's weird hangups would go away if he just cut loose more often. Getting high together in the greenhouse had been _great_ , for example.

But no sense arguing about it. Joel scratched at the sparse hair of his chin and shuffled toward his locker to hang up his robe. "That's cool, it's no problem. Pretty sure the bots don't think it's a big deal either," he said. "I've kissed Crow and Tommy as a joke before. It's just funny."

"Oh. Uh, I guess I've done that too," Mike admitted. "Like for sketches and stuff. Gypsy too."

"See?" Joel popped his head out behind the partition, eyebrows waggling. _"You have kissed the lips that have kissed Joel Robinson."_

He caught sight of Mike blushing and bursting into laughter just before he ducked behind the partition again. He grinned to himself, pulling his PJs from their hook in his locker.

"It's different, I guess. I don't know," Mike said. "I guess it's just one of those things. Like... why are you undressing behind a wall when I already know what you look like?"

 _That_ was an unexpectedly good point. Joel hesitated for a moment, then finished tugging on his sleep shorts. He appeared from behind the partition a second later, with his shirt hanging loose and unbuttoned from his shoulders.

"Touche, my friend," he said, leaning on the side of the wall with his hip jutting out. "So... how 'bout you come take these things off me?"

Mike laughed again. It was a short, disbelieving little titter, but he was already advancing over to Joel.

"All right..."

He stopped just in front of him, sharing a breath and holding a gaze between them which was almost-but-not-quite level. It was still a bit surreal: Joel had once dated a model who towered a full head taller than him, but in general, he was used to the people he had sex with being at his own height or shorter. Mike occupied this strange liminal zone between appreciably taller and not, and it was a little disorienting, always having to look up but only a little.

After maintaining this staring contest for a couple seconds, Mike tentatively reached up a hand and tucked his fingers beneath the open collar of Joel's bed shirt, sliding it back over his shoulder. The cool air hitting his upper arm made Joel's heartbeat seem to pound out of rhythm for a moment, while Mike's hand, surer than before, reached behind Joel's back and continued to tug the shirt down and off his body. His gaze never flickered.

 _This is weirdly intimate,_ Joel thought wildly, as his pulse continued to quicken. Before, when they got going like this, the lights were already turned down and one or both of them were already hard, eager to just start rubbing into the other guy's hand or against his thigh or whatever was convenient. Anything more complex than that had just kind of fallen out of their purview. This, though...

Mike crossed his hand over Joel's chest and slid the fabric from his other shoulder easily. Rather than just letting the shirt fall on its own, he drew his hand languidly down the length of Joel's arm, gathering the sleeve between his fingers and letting it drop only at the last moment, when he circled Joel's wrist with his thumb over his pulsepoint.

Joel let out a sharp breath in surprise. He broke their gaze, glancing down at where Mike had taken hold of his wrist and seeing the bones and tendons flex under Mike's skin, a bloom of heat unfurling through his chest as though he'd never seen another human's hand working before.

That was about when Mike's other hand found Joel's nipple, and ran a thumb over it.

 _This_ time Joel did more than let out a breath; he gasped, a prickling sensation going up his spine. Men didn't usually bother with nipples and the fact that Mike _did_ meant he was either very perceptive or liked to take chances. Either way, he succeeded in making Joel's knees start to wobble beneath him.

And while that was happening, Mike dipped his head in at an angle and found the mark he'd made on Joel's throat the other night, grazing his teeth over the fading bruise and then applying an electrifying pressure with his lips.

"Gosh," Joel babbled, grabbing Mike's shoulder for balance as the latter leaned back again, leaving Joel tipped to one side on his already unsteady legs. His head was pounding. His skin was so feverish that Mike's fingers felt cool when they played over his lower lip. "That's, uh, so you're, heh..."

He heard Mike chuckle somewhere above him. "Too much?"

"Nnnnn." Joel's tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of his mouth. He wasn't hard yet, but a bit more touching could change that. And he was already fighting the urge to just let his knees give and get his mouth around Mike just like this. "Nn, no. But good. Go, go lie down."

"Got something planned?" Mike asked, releasing Joel's wrist. The other hand lingered at Joel's shoulder, tracing the renewed bruise on his neck.

"Yeah," Joel answered. He cleared his throat, feeling Mike's fingers against his skin, and was queerly disappointed when Mike took it as a signal to give him a bit of personal space. "You'll like this one."

"Heh. All right..."

As soon as Mike was out of sight beyond the partition, Joel took advantage of the reprieve to take a few deep breaths.

 _That was weird,_ Joel decided, scrubbing the heel of his palm over his flushed cheeks. Whether it was a good weird or scary weird, he wasn't sure yet. Mike definitely hadn't taken the lead like that with him before, but was it just a game to get back at him for the kissing thing or was Mike planning to follow up at some point?

Well, whatever Mike's deal was, it'd have to wait for another time. Joel had something very specific in mind for tonight and no time-traveling ham hock with unexpectedly gifted fingers was going to distract him from it. Joel turned to gather his bed shirt up from the floor and dig out a few 'materials' from his locker.

* * *

Joel reappeared just a few seconds later, with a spare towel and some other items gathered in his arm held against his naked chest. Mike felt a small flourish of pride at that -- it would've been a pity if Joel had gone and replaced his shirt after Mike had taken the trouble to remove it.

Meanwhile, that little burst of bashfulness that Mike had teased out of him seemed to have subsided. There was that spark of sleepy curiosity in Joel's expression again, like a cat casually observing a bit of prey it's thinking about pouncing. As his eyes traveled over to Mike, presently disrobed and sitting on the bed with one leg bent, he positively lit up.

"That's a good start," Joel said as he crossed the distance to the bed, a little Bogart swagger to his walk. "But let's see if we can improve it."

Joel deposited his bundle in a nearby chair and climbed in, using Mike's shoulders for support as he knelt between his legs and then to urge Mike to lie back. He also grabbed a pillow and stuck it beneath Mike, at the curve of his spine just above his pelvis.

"Dare I ask?" Mike inquired, more bemused than scared. Whatever Joel was planning, it was already a lot more involved than anything they had done so far, but he doubted it would push at his boundaries like the threat of kissing had. Few things would.

"Oh, gosh, don't make me say it," Joel chastised with a playful pout, mock-slapping Mike's knee. He reached for the contents of the bundle left on the chair and returned with -- yep, a condom and a packet of lubricant.

"Heh... you act like a regular ol' Boy Scout a lot of the time, but you're actually pretty dirty, aren't you?" Mike teased, propping himself up on his elbows.

" _Hush._ Anyway, it's too bad we aren't on Earth," Joel continued, leaving lube and condom by Mike's hip for the moment while he palmed at the organ between his legs. "We could get a lot more creative. Instead of just making do with what we've got."

Earth. Just one short escape pod trip away, Mike reminded himself. And he had to tell Joel about it soon, preferably before he made his call tomorrow, or else he'd...

He lost that train of thought, as Joel turned his wrist just-so while stroking over the head of Mike's shaft. Mike hissed through his teeth.

"So you just happened to have this stuff onboard?" Mike gasped, trying to focus. He had actually not seen Joel working his hand around him before this -- either the lights were off or Mike still had his boxers on, or something like that. Suffice to say, seeing Joel's hand move up and down on his shaft produced a heck of a positive feedback loop.

"Sure," Joel answered innocently, releasing Mike's cock just as the tip grew wet (to a groan of disappointment from his partner). He turned his attention to unwrapping the condom -- which was faintly pink in color -- and squeezing a dollop of lube into the tip. "Astroglide was invented by NASA, yanno. They use it on space shuttles."

"Uh-huh," Mike said, breathy. "And the condoms?"

"Ever watched those making-of features for movies? They use condoms for blood bags and squibs," Joel explained, wiping his hands on his shorts before neatly rolling the thin latex over the head of Mike's cock. "The bots like to do skits with fake blood sometimes."

Mike tried to form another skeptical reply, but all that came out was a grunt. The condom was tight, ridiculously so, and yet the latex was thin enough that it almost felt like Joel's fingers were still touching him directly, as he rolled the material down to the base of his shaft. It was too intense to even watch -- Mike dropped down from his elbows, head rolling back against the mattress as Joel gave him a few firm strokes to ensure the lube was evenly coated inside.

"Sure... I'll buy that," Mike groaned, screwing his eyelids shut and trying (failing) not to thrust up into Joel's grip. "What do you want me to do with my hands?"

"Well, I don't have a lot of hair, but you can play with that," Joel offered.

This was Joel in his entirety again, the way Mike had come to know him: the man who was unfazed by anything and as direct with his body as he wasn't with his words; for whom nothing was all that serious. In all Mike's years filling in for him on the SOL, and even meeting him not long ago in his own timeline, he could not have foreseen what Joel Robinson was really like -- how boyishly clever and talented and actually very, very sweet he was, in his own odd way.

Mike still didn't think of himself as being into men -- college dalliances with guys named Steve aside -- but Gypsy was right: Joel was special to him. Very special.

And right then, Joel was resituating himself on the bed, getting down onto his elbows and knees between Mike's legs. Mike didn't know how a body could fold up like that. A second later, without any sort of warning, Joel dipped his head between Mike's knees and swirled his tongue over the head of his cock.

"Joel," Mike breathed, fingers digging into the sheets.

"Hm! Cherry-flavored," Joel said appreciatively, before taking Mike properly into his mouth.


	5. Day 4

**Day 4**

Mouths. Mouths were really neat, Mike decided.

He had never given a lot of thought to them before. But now, everything around him seemed to resemble one. The round gate on the bridge airlock. The aperture on the Hexfield. The rim of his coffee cup. His eyes traced each O-shaped opening and imagined lips, wet and stretched; a tongue, caressing and massaging from inside; hot breath and tight suction and Joel's eyelashes fluttering softly against his cheeks...

"Mike? Mike, you can make your call now, if you want."

Mike snapped out of his intense study of a loose nut and bolt lying on the desk and looked up, his face an image of nonchalant innocence. Or something like it, given he was going on three hours' sleep.

It wasn't really his fault. Sure, he needed to be up this early because it was already close to nine o'clock down in Minnesota, but Joel was also just a beast to share a bed with. He kept scratching his toenails against Mike's calves and sleeptalking about hamburgers. It was a bit much.

"Thanks, Gypsy," Mike said, bearing her a tired smile. He took a sip from his mug and nearly spat it back out, forgetting until too late that his 'coffee' was actually straight grounds mixed with milk and two sugars. Mike had overlooked Joel's warning about the water filtration being down until he'd already ruined the coffee maker. "Gah... Urgh, you mind stepping outside for this one? It's kind of a... personal matter."

"Sure thing, Mike," Gypsy answered, her long body slithering away from the helm. "Just try not to touch any of the controls, okay?"

"Hey, you know, someday I'll be driving this thing," Mike objected, waving his cup of soggy grounds at the conn. "You even trust me with it."

"We'll see," said Gypsy, sounding amused. It took a couple minutes for her many yards of cabling to accompany her off the bridge.

Alone at last, save Cambot who regarded him from the corner with a wary deep-focus lens, Mike took a deep breath and set his mug down. Then he produced a yellowing touch-tone phone from beneath the desk and placed it beside his mug, walking around the back of the back to run the phone cable into Cambot's outgoing comm relay.

Cambot bobbed in silent disapproval, but Mike went about his business, flicking the appropriate switches and (mostly) catching his mistakes before anything started smoldering. He'd placed enough calls to Earth to usually not screw up this step _too_ catastrophically. It just took a little trial and error to remember the entire procedure.

When the floor of the bridge was a snarl of cables and the comm lights were burning hot, Mike returned to the desk and dug an old calling card out of his jumpsuit pocket. In his own timeline, the thing had long since been tapped of all value, but now that he was back in 1995, he could finally use it again. And that was great because calling from high geostationary orbit wasn't exactly cheap. Or easy.

"Happy Time Temp Agency," a voice droned on speakerphone, about three minutes later when he finally managed to connect.

"Yeah, hi," Mike said receiver, keeping his palm over Cambot's main lens (much to the latter's mute chagrin). "I'm trying to reach one of your workers, a Michael J. Nelson. Is he on a job today?"

"Mike, is that you?" the secretary on the other end answered peevishly. It sounded like Tenisha. Had he dated Tenisha? "If this is another bogus attempt at pretending you're down with the Plague..."

"No! I mean, uh, _no,_ " Mike stressed, straightening out his diaphragm to reach a deeper tenor. "This is his father speaking, Michael J. Nelson... uh, _Senior_. There's a family emergency and I need you to put me through right away."

"I'll see if he's in," Tenisha said, sounding dubious. "And not falling over drunk again."

Mike cringed. He hadn't done that more than once or twice on the job, had he?

The tinny hold music clicked on, and Mike dropped his hand from Cambot's lens. As the robot hovered off fussily to grab a dust wipe, Mike leaned against the edge of the desk and worked over, for about the 200th time since last night, if he was doing the right thing. Temporal paradoxes being what they were, and his embarrassing tendency to destroy civilizations he came in contact with, there was _probably_ at least a considerable chance that talking with his previous self would lead to the annihilation of all life on Earth. Again.

On the other hand, Mike had already come in contact with Joel plenty of times (Mike's eyes drifted to the lone nut and bolt lying on the desk again) and he wasn't annihilated, as far as Mike could tell. So maybe his future was looking up for once. There was no harm in trying, right?

"Heya, Pops. What's going on? Is it Gran again?"

Mike shook himself out of his thoughts and stood up straight, just as Cambot swung back into position. He didn't have nearly enough time to block the lens before the two-way video connection was established, leaving him face-to-face with... well, himself.

The younger Mike, dressed in his cheap dress shirt and polyester tie, appeared to be on assignment at some desk job today. Mike had always liked those: plenty of free food and coffee, cute office workers, and he never had to do any real work. Shame he always seemed to get the boot for 'low efficiency,' whatever that meant.

"That's funny," the Mike on the viewscreen mumbled, chewing his bearclaw. Mike could not remember ever having so few age lines on his face, and the guy on the screen looked thinner too. But did he really sound like that? "Uh... Hey, handsome."

"Ah, hi, Mike," Mike said from the bridge. "Uh, this is gonna seem strange but..."

"You're me from the future, right?" Mike-the-temp asked.

"Uh, yes," Mike-the-time-traveler said, relieved, splaying his hands on the desk in front of him. "Wow, that saves me a whole lot I don't have to explain. Thanks."

"Yeah, I'm used to it," younger Mike said, shrugging. "One of your robot friends started turning up in 1985 and I haven't really got rid of him since. He even hooked up with one of my exes. A real nice one, too..."

 _Crow_. Older Mike hid a wince, a whole host of memories he thought he'd successfully blocked out about the little time-traveling bot and his girl Ginger. Why did his younger self have to bring that up?

"...But anyway," younger Mike finished amiably. " Whatcha got for me, me?"

"H-huh? Oh. Okay, yeah, uh, first things first, no questions about future portents or lottery numbers or any of that stuff, all right? And I'm calling collect from space so let's just... not talk about Ginger either, deal?"

"Okay," younger Mike said, nonplussed. His gaze seemed to be fixated on older Mike's hairline. "Uh, gee, that doesn't leave much for me to ask. What about Pepper?"

"Nope."

"Carla?"

"Married Brock."

"Tenisha?"

"So I _did_ date her! But no, no, that doesn't work out either, man."

"Well, shucks, do I wind up with anyone?" younger Mike complained, his brow scrunching up toward the middle of his face. "I might be in the prime of my life right now and all, but you, you're looking kinda Hugh Beaumont-y over there, no offense. I just thought I would've settled down by the time I was looking like that..."

"Hey, kid, I'm only five years older than you!" older Mike shot back, raising his voice. Then, after a pause, he amended, "Well, five hundred and thirty-one years older, actually, but most of that was spent as a being of pure knowledge and energy, so it doesn't count, all right?"

"Did you just come back in time to tell me I'm going to die alone?"

"Urgh, _no_. Listen! This is important. You know that big place up in the mountains where they launch a lot of satellites?"

"Gizmonics. Sure. Is that how I get into space, working on rockets?"

"Uh... kinda?" older Mike guessed. "More like a couple mad scientists there hire you to help them with their audit and then they knock you out and send you to a geostationary satellite to watch bad--"

"Bad movies for the rest of my life, yeahyeahyeah, I got that part," younger Mike finished for him, turning his hand in a circular 'get on with it' gesture. "So what about it?"

"You're headed up there for a job in about three days," Mike-the-time-traveler explained. "When you get there, I need you to do something for me..."

"Hold on, hold on, hold on," Mike-the-temp interrupted again. He scooted forward in his gray office chair, leaning closer to the camera. "So is this it, then? I'm about to meet my destiny here? You know, you could have started with that."

"It doesn't need to be anyone's destiny, all right? Now, I need you to listen closely and take this stuff down. There's an escape pod aboard the satellite. Are you following me? But you need to be at those mad scientists' lair in order to transfer us direct control up here on the station. So what you need to do is--"

"Whoa, hang on, I gotta get a pen."

"Damn it, man, I'm talking about your future here!" the older Mike barked, slapping the desk with an open palm. It was a put-upon display but, dang it, if anyone was entitled to order his younger self around like a bad Gunnery Sergeant Hartman cameo, it should be him. "Do you wanna watch Roger Corman films for the rest of your life?"

"No, sir!" the younger Mike answered fervently, brow furrowing as he scribbled onto an office notepad. "Get to Gizmonics -- transfer direct control... escape pod... How do I do that?"

"Okay, first of all, you gotta look it up on the satellite's manifest. It's listed under 'Hamdingers'..."

Younger Mike's nose crinkled. "Oh, come on!"

* * *

Gypsy remained patiently outside the door to the bridge for the entire length of Mike's call. It wasn't _technically_ eavesdropping -- it wasn't her fault Mike didn't know that all outbound calls routed through the central communications relay were run through a parallel encryption process on her main system, giving her complete real-time access to anything transmitted to or from the satellite -- but she did feel just a little bit guilty about it, all the same. Still, any guilt she felt was marginal compared to her growing exasperation, because _boys_.

Anyway, she didn't think her presence in the corridor merited the "Gah!" she received from Mike as he exited the bridge, nearly colliding head-first with her and all that. With a single 'harrumph' she rose up on her serpentine cable until she was just over his eye level, and tilted her single optic down at him.

"Mike, we need to talk," she intoned, as diplomatically as her voice modulator allowed.

"So you heard, huh?" was Mike's response, shrinking against a wall. Why did she have that effect on humans whenever she stood up straight? It just made them look even more like little squishable rodents.

"You told me that crate of Hamdingers was just a crate of Hamdingers," Gypsy said firmly, trying not to share how much that still stung. Imagine! Lying about how hungry he was! "I searched the ship's database while you were talking, Mike. That escape pod is built for a single occupancy. And it's the only one on board."

She watched Mike's jaw work, a pained look creeping into his expression.

"...Yeah," he admitted. His voice was quieter now. "I remember. But, there has to be a way we can modify it. Fit it with extra seatbelts, double the O2 tanks..."

Gypsy swung her head side to side curtly. "I've run three thousand four hundred and five scenarios for the modification of the escape pod," she said, "and none of them produce a survivability rating above point oh five percent. There's just no way to fit both you and Joel."

That did it. Mike sagged, looking as though the wind had been knocked out of him.

"That can't be right. Come on, Gypsy. There's gotta be something," he insisted, grasping for purchase somewhere in this conversation. "I can't... I've already been up here for five years! I know it doesn't look that way to you, but--"

"So has Joel," Gypsy reminded. "And he had to watch all those Gamera movies twice!"

"Gypsy, if I stay up here, I'll be watching _five years of Gamera-level movies twice_. And if you think Gamera was bad, wait till we get to _Invasion of the Neptune Men_ , or, or the Ed Wood films!" Mike shot his hands out to emphasize the sheer badness of this scenario. "You think I want to subject Joel to that either?"

"No, of course not," Gypsy said, gentling a little. One thing she had never doubted was Mike's fast friendship with Joel, even if he continued to do things that ran a good risk of breaking her poor inventor's heart. "But no matter what you want, you can't take Joel with you on the escape pod. There's just no way, Mike."

Mike's shoulders drooped again. "And... definitely no way to fit me, Joel, and you and the others, right?" he asked, searching her face as though it were capable of expression.

Gypsy felt oddly taken aback by the question. It hadn't occurred to her that Mike might be thinking of a way to get them _all_ down, not that it was anymore feasible -- the numbers dropped into the 0.00000001% range before she even factored in Tom's luggage. But it was the thought that counted, she decided in that moment.

"Nothing that I can think of," she said, her tone growing apologetic despite herself. Who could stay mad at that face? "But you'll always be welcome here on the Satellite of Love, you know!"

"Sure... Thanks, Gypsy." For as tired as Mike had seemed before, now he seemed ten times as fatigued. He raked a hand through his dark blond hair and bore Gypsy a fragile smile for which she supposed the effort was the important thing. "Look, sorry I kept all this stuff from you."

"It's all right, Mike," said Gypsy, her circulator fans whirring with approval. She even lowered her body by a few inches, coming closer to his eye level once more. "We all make mistakes, especially when we're tired! Why don't you try going back to bed for a while? I bet Joel's feeling lonely..."

"You know, yeah, that's not such a bad... hey." Mike's shoulders bunched together, as he brought up his arms in defense. "Would you just knock it off with that? And tell the guys no more musical numbers either."

* * *

Joel was still asleep when Mike quietly crept his way back into their cabin. In the absence of his fellow man's body warmth, Joel had sprawled onto his stomach and stretched himself over the entire expanse of the narrow bunk, one foot dangling off the edge of the mattress. He looked so utterly comfortable it seemed a crime to disturb him.

Mike debated just leaving him like this and finding somewhere else to crash for a few hours, but he reminded himself, the bed _was_ pretty much the only warm spot aboard the station right now. If Joel could tolerate sharing the bunk again, Mike could probably deal with fighting over the blankets for a little bit longer.

Easing back the comforter, Mike knelt one leg on the mattress and got his hands under Joel's stomach to start rolling him onto his shoulder. Joel began to stir as Mike did this, mumbling something about potato-skin rabbits as he grabbed weakly at the fabric of the other man's jumpsuit.

"It's always food with you," Mike murmured, kicking off his sandals and sliding into the recently freed up space on the mattress. He should take out his contacts before he did this, he reminded himself, but it was a little too late now -- as soon as he scooted close, Joel immediately entangled their legs and snaked an arm around Mike's chest again. It was all Mike could do just to tug the comforter back over them before he was ensnared completely.

Joel hummed in approval, adjusting himself around Mike until he was satisfied and then quickly dozing off again. Mike was amazed: for as perennially tired as Joel always seemed to be (on or off the contents of his pipe), he wasn't a very heavy sleeper, and Mike had grown accustomed to waking up long after he did. But now he was dead as a rock, and it was kind of adorable.

Mike released a small sigh, relaxing further into the embrace. With his jumpsuit on like this, the heat beneath the comforter was probably going to get unbearable really soon, but in the meantime it meant he could avoid the threat of Joel's scratchy feet. He scooted closer, sliding an arm around Joel's waist.

It was funny, but despite four straight days of close contact like this, touching another human being was still a pretty intense experience for Mike. Probably that went both ways -- even when he and Joel weren't doing anything in particular, they seemed to end up holding hands or sitting close to each other or whatever. A few times, Mike had caught Joel just putting two fingers to his wrist to time his heartbeat.

Mike figured it was very possible that they could leave this whole sex thing behind them and they'd still end up like this, a mess of tangled limbs listening to each other's breathing. After all, after five years of respective isolation, there was a lot to relearn.

Watching Joel's face, Mike felt himself lulled into a sort of peace, subconsciously syncing every exhale with the other man's inhale, their chests fitted against one another in the same, alternating rhythm. He studied his lips, which were still red and bruised from last night's activities, and did honestly debate simply kissing him -- get this part over with for both of them.

 _And it's only a bit like autofellatio,_ Mike reasoned to himself, and took that train of thought no farther, lest he end up doing something embarrassing. He marshalled himself to review his situation, before his own fatigue caught back up with him.

So the facts, as far as Mike could break things down, were these:

-He had arranged with his former self to activate the escape pod no later than the next experiment day, but:

-If he (or Joel) used it, it would have to be solo, which wasn't an option because:

- _He_ didn't want to stick around, but he couldn't just leave Joel to his fate either, so:

-Where did that leave Mike except to take Gypsy up on her offer, and stay here aboard the station for a while?

Mike had fought to escape for years, sometimes proactively, sometimes allowing it to drop a bit in his priorities, but he had always held onto the prospect of getting back to his old life on Earth. Now all the pieces were lining up, except for the part where it'd mean screwing over Joel, and he just couldn't do that.

It wasn't even a matter of respect. Mike wasn't sure yet what it was, but he was starting to get an idea: this thing between them was no longer 'casual,' if it had ever been to start with. And maybe Joel didn't see it that way and maybe that didn't even matter -- maybe it was just enough that... that...

"Mike?" Joel asked in a small croak of a voice, just the barest sliver of his eyes visible through a fugue of sleep.

"Yeah, Joel?" Mike answered softly.

"Are you touching my butt?"

Mike hesitated. His brow bunched up as he considered this question, trying to retrace where his hand had wandered since he'd first climbed into bed. He was definitely cupping something soft. He tried a light, experimental squeeze.

"...Looks like it, yeah," Mike confirmed. Then, in the interests of being gentlemanly, he added: "Want me to stop?"

"Nah," Joel said, adjusting his head against the pillow. "Just checking."

"...Joel."

"Hm."

"Could I, um... Your mouth, it's really..."

It seemed that Joel was already falling back asleep, eyes fluttering closed as his cheek nestled into the pillowcase. But he still managed a loose grin, bruised lips seeming only a little swollen in the dim light of the cabin.

"Boy, you're kinda kinky," he drawled. "Gimme a few hours. You can return the favor."

* * *

And a few hours later...

"Joel, do you ever plan on leaving the station?"

Joel peered down at the sturdy blond kneeling between his legs. They had struggled for a bit to find a good beginner's position of Mike, something that wouldn't put too much strain on his arms or his neck, and kneeling on the floor beside the bed with Joel seated at the edge of the mattress seemed like the most practical solution. And here they were, with Joel all wrapped up and ready to go (so to speak), and Mike was trying to hold a conversation.

"I guess, sure," Joel answered casually, all the same. "I mean, you say I do, so I guess it's gotta happen someday."

"Sure, but do you _want_ to?" Mike stressed, squeezing Joel's right thigh above the knee.

"Can we have this talk later...?"

"Right -- sorry..."

Mike's tongue darted between his lips again as his gaze dropped to Joel's erection. Joel had helpfully prepared everything himself and even picked the flavor for the condom (banana), so in theory there was nothing about his first blowjob for Mike to screw up.

As usual, though, Joel sort of underestimated Mike's clumsiness. After Mike dipped his head in just a little too close and stubbed his nose against the head of Joel's cock, he made a few awkward false starts with his mouth trying out different angles of approach before finally managing to press his lips tentatively against the tip.

"Hey, there we go. Our first kiss," Joel teased, as between his legs Mike's entire face turned a deep shade of mauve. "This time try it with your tongue."

"Come on, no backseat blowjobbing up there," Mike said with a huff, probably unaware what a nice sensation his breath was through the latex. Nevertheless, he did as suggested, his tongue quiveringly drawing a half-circle over the tip. An appreciative sigh from Joel spurred him on and he dipped his head forward again, lapping in short licks along the side of Joel's shaft.

"So, yeah," Joel groaned, shifting his hips and spreading his legs even further as Mike started to find a good approach. "I dunno, I think I'm fine just staying up here. You know?"

"Mnf--" Mike's mouth came away from suckling a nice spot just below the head and gave Joel a cross look. "So, what, by 'later' you meant _'now'?_ "

"Hey, don't stop, you were doing good."

Mike grumbled but complied.

"I'm just more of a fan of taking things as they come," Joel continued, unconcerned. Keeping himself balanced on one hand, he used the other to card his fingers through Mike's hair to help guide him to a good spot. "I mean, yeah, the movies aren't a high point, but we've got a big ship to ourselves, we've got a nice greenhouse, a well-stocked kitchen... And we don't have to pay taxes, which is kinda nice."

"Mmn," Mike agreed, still sounding annoyed even as he applied some _very_ pleasant, firm strokes to the underside of Joel's shaft.

"And I know it's paradoxical," Joel went on, "but we're probably safer from Doctor Forrester up here than if we were back at the Institute."

Despite the hand in his hair, Mike jerked his head back in protest again. His lips were already a scandalous shade of pink. "Hey, it's kind of affecting my pride that you're saying words like 'paradoxical' while I'm trying to do this," he objected.

"Oh. Well. You probably just need to start sucking more," Joel supplied helpfully. "Think of it like a banana-flavored popsicle."

"This is supposed to be banana?"

"What's it taste like to you?"

"Chapstick," Mike said with a grimace. He added quickly, before Joel could nudge him back toward his crotch again: "So you're really saying you want to stay here, on the satellite?"

"I thought we weren't talking about that now?"

"Come on," Mike prodded.

"I guess..." Joel relented, because really, he supposed he had to say it sooner or later. "As long as you're here, it's more good than bad?"

Mike's eyebrows shot toward his hairline. "That's, uh... That's really..." He stammered in half sentences like that for a bit. "...Well. Thanks? I never thought..."

He trailed off, though his mouth still moved, as if struggling to frame the words. Giving this up, Mike diverted his attention back to the more immediate matter at hand (well, hands) and rolled his lips over the head of Joel's erection, slipping him into his mouth.

Joel grunted, a warm shiver traveling up his lower back. Where before Mike had just nervously fumbled his tongue wherever Joel had nudged him, now he was acting with purpose, making up for what he lacked in experience with some truly admirable concentration. It wasn't perfect, but for the first blowjob Joel had enjoyed since _well_ before being sent up into space, he was definitely not about to be picky.

"Whoa. Easy," he groaned, when Mike slid too deep and started to sputter. He stroked his fingers through Mike's hair, dragging fingernails lightly against his scalp. "I like you too, big guy."

* * *

The bots couldn't understand why it was nearly noon before either Mike or Joel exited their cabin, or why they both immediately went to use the restroom when they did.

Crow's theory was that the two had been deeply involved in a game of Alain Resnais-themed Parcheesi, while Servo speculated that Mike -- big clod that he was -- had simply capsized several more theoretically uncapsizeable objects, like beds, chairs and the cabin's door leading out to the rest of the ship, and thus it had simply taken them this long to extricate themselves. The geometries involved in this were a bit complicated, but there was one thing both bots agreed on: it definitely could not be Joel's fault.

Nevertheless, armed with today's mission, Crow and Servo took up position around the corner from the bathroom. They waited until Mike was done rinsing his mouth out for some unknown purpose, watched him calmly shuffle toward the kitchen, then struck.

"Mike!"

"Mike, our main man!"

"Manly, masculine Mike!"

"How are ya today, Mike?"

Mike slowed in his walk, mostly to prevent tripping over any errant robot parts. As to the two's sudden appearance, he was disappointingly nonplussed, regarding them as casually as he had before yesterday's boating accident.

"Oh, hey, guys," he said. His voice seemed scratchier than usual. "How's your day going?"

" _Fine_ , Mike, very _fine,_ " Crow assured him, his violin bow legs nearly long enough to match Mike's stride, though not quite. "And how are _you_ this fine, uhhh... whatever day of the week this is?"

"Good, pretty good. Dry," Mike noted. 

"Always a positive step!" said Crow.

"Say, Mike," Tom spoke up, taking over as he used his hoverskirt to fly closer to Mike's eye level. "We were wondering -- when're you gonna make an honest man out of Joel?"

"Uh." Mike managed a confused chuckle. "Not sure what you mean."

"After yesterday's masterfully executed serenade it's _pretty_ obvious you have designs on the good Joel Robinson," Tom puffed.

"Yeah," Crow agreed.

" _And_ unless you're planning to lead him down a life of debauchery and sin, and by consequence cast us, his dear inventions, into a whirlwind life of teenage delinquency and parking tickets, _well!_ You gotta make it official, mister!"

"Yeah!"

"Now, hold on," Mike said firmly, stopping in his tracks. He balanced a palm on the flat of Tom's head to urge him back down closer to Crow's height. "First of all, I think you're jumping to conclusions. A lot of conclusions, actually. And second of all, you guys are taking those social hygiene shorts Forrester shows you from the Fifties _way_ too seriously. I mean, geez, did Joel really never teach you anything about how dating works in real life?"

"So you _are_ dating?" Servo prompted, cutting right to the heart of the matter.

"Wh-- _No._ " Mike hesitated. "Maybe," he amended. "Ask Joel. What's it got to do with you guys, anyway?"

"Hey, man, Joel made us!" Crow countered. "Who he smooches has _everything_ to do with us!"

"Yeah! So let's see some smooching!" Servo chimed in, leaning in knowingly. "Hot, buttery, man-lip-on-man-lip action."

"Stubbled chins, meaty breath..."

"The tender sensuality that only two men can know!"

"And what would you guys know about it?" Mike demanded. By the bots' estimates, most of the blood in his body was rushing toward his ears with all speed. "Come on, knock it off! This isn't even funny anymore."

"Aw, please, Mike!" Crow wailed, changing tactics immediately.

"We don't wanna be products of a single-parent home anymore!" Servo cried, following suit. "Studies show it'll affect us later in life!"

"Be our second dad and make Joel happy, please please please please--"

"All right! All right!" Mike said, putting up his hands. "I mean-- no! I mean-- enough! Listen, no matter _what_ you think is going on with me and Joel, it's our business and nobody else's. So just... just give it a rest, okay?"

At Mike's waist, Crow and Servo exchanged a silent glance. This human was being more difficult than they had anticipated. A cunning creature indeed, this Mike Nelson, despite being from a post-apocalyptic Future Wisconsin or wherever he said he was from.

Desperate measures were clearly called for.

"Aw, hey now, don't you guys go planning anything again," Mike warned from up above, apparently having seen the look. "And no more musical numbers. I mean it."

"Mike!" Tom Servo sputtered, spring arms quivering in indignation. "I'm _offended_ that you think we'd pull the same routine twice! We're professionals here!"

"Ixnay! Ixnay!" Crow tried to deliver the words through only the corner of his beak, but the effect was lost somewhat, given the beak's dimensions.

"Oh!" said Servo, catching on regardless. "I mean, of _course_ we're not planning anything, Mike! Don't be ridiculous! We totally respect your and Joel's privacy to comport yourselves how you wish!"

"Uh-huh," Mike deadpanned.

"Especially since you've already confirmed that you're dating," Servo continued.

"Now look here!" Mike objected. "I said--"

* * *

"You said _what?_ " Joel asked, pausing in the midst of filling his pipe.

They were in the greenhouse again, which was another way of saying they were on the Satellite of Love's portside observation deck. With the station's starboard side permanently facing the Earth, the large bay windows on the port side kept the greenhouse stocked with UV rays from the Sun for most of the natural day. Right now, the Earth loomed as a dark crescent, as the line of daylight just slipped from North America's Western seaboard.

It was a nice view, which was probably why Joel had picked this spot for his smoking den, quite apart from being within easy reach of his garden.

"I said 'maybe,'" Mike repeated, ungluing his gaze from the horizon. Leaning with his weight on his arms on the observation walkway's railing, he watched for a flicker in Joel's starlit expression. That was no good, so he took to studying the man's sneakers instead. "So are we?"

Joel's right foot rocked on its heel once, twice, then stopped, tucking itself beneath his other leg on the beanbag chair.

"I guess, sure, if that's what you wanna tell 'em," Joel said casually, sounding as unconcerned as ever. He resumed tapping his finely ground leaves into the bowl, packing them down gently with his thumb. "I dunno why you'd want to, though. I mean, you're straight, right?"

Mike tipped forward, nearly losing his balance against the railing for a moment. Even after he righted himself, his mouth still hung open for a few beats before he remembered how to close it.

Somehow, despite three consecutive days of _very_ frequent sex, this wasn't a subject Joel had seen fit to broach until now. Even saying the word aloud seemed weird. And how could Mike honestly answer that question in the affirmative, considering Joel had just coached him through a blowjob a few hours ago?

It didn't matter anyway, Mike decided: orientation didn't mean anything when you were marooned in space, and even if it did, Joel was a special exception to pretty much every rule. Besides that, Mike had just seen the guy's foot twitch, the same tell he'd seen when Joel talked to Forrester the other day. He was just trying to deflect things again.

"Well, what about you?" Mike countered, rather than answering.

"Me? Oh, I dunno." Joel turned his gaze aside, examining some of his tools laid out on the low table. From Mike's vantage point he was mostly a silhouette now. "I'm not really good with that stuff."

 _Good enough to build up a diverse list of skills in bed, at least,_ Mike refrained from saying.

"Sure, but..." he said instead. "The bots got the idea from somewhere. I mean, they're really serious about this whole 'nuclear family' thing."

"I can't control that," Joel replied, shrugging, his head lolling to one side. "They're young and impressionable. They see all the families in all these old movies we watch and they want to imitate it. They'll get over it eventually."

Something about that stung, though Mike couldn't quite place how or why. It was true, though: whatever Crow and Servo were obsessed with at a given moment, it was a good bet that their interest would die down within a few days, if not a few minutes. And it wasn't beyond human beings to be just as fickle, when it came right down to it.

"So what do we tell them?" Mike asked.

"Mm. Whatever you want to," came Joel's characteristically somnolent reply.

"What do _you_ want to tell them?" Mike pressed.

No answer. Across from him, settling back into his beanbag chair, Joel lifted the glass pipe to his lips and flicked on his lighter. The leaves in the bowl hissed faintly as they glowed to a bright orange, and a few seconds later Joel slowly exhaled a thick, silvery ribbon of smoke.

Overhead, the nocturnal viewing lights hummed to life, brightening up the observation deck until it was probably just light enough to read a book, if Mike's eyesight were better. He did manage to make out Joel's perfectly placid face, eyes softly closed as if he had dropped straight into deep meditation -- or just dozed into a nap.

The spell lasted only a few seconds. Then Joel spoke up again, his voice huskier and scratched, not too far from how he had sounded last night.

"Come here."

Mike complied without a second thought, leaving the railing and crossing the few feet to Joel's side. He crouched down and sank into the spare beanbag chair next to him, wordlessly accepting the pipe when Joel passed it over to him.

And that was it. That was how Joel ended the conversation. Inside of thirty minutes, the two men were sprawled out atop one another engaged in nothing more serious than discussing why cars should come with U-turn signals.

Mike couldn't find it in himself to mind, really. Even a bad time with Joel was a good time with Joel, or that was how things were shaking out so far. If at some point he found himself with the other man in his lap, his mouth smushed against the shell of Joel's ear while they lined up their palms and compared the lengths of their fingers, it was still probably fine.

Joel didn't want to leave the station. Mike couldn't get both of them back to Earth even if he wanted to, so it didn't even matter. At the moment, Joel was warm, funny, kind, and somehow fit into Mike's lap even if he should've been much too big for it. Just because he didn't want anything to do with the word 'relationship' was no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

But there was just so much for Mike to have to square with Joel-of-right-now and his memories of the other Joel, and most of all, the Joel-shaped void he'd been trying to fill for five years.

"Joel," he said, face buried against the side of Joel's collar.

"Yeah, honey?" came his companion's answer, still massaging a thumb over his knuckles.

There was a lingering question from that dusty corner of Mike's skull which didn't want to accept things were just fine, and it kicked itself to the front of his mind through the haze.

"...Why didn't you let me go with you?" he asked.

"Huh?"

"Back then... Uh, in the future. When you saved the ship and I asked to head back to Earth with you. You said you didn't want to take me with you."

"I dunno," said Joel. "What was I doing before I said it?"

"Changing the oil filter."

"You didn't do that?" Joel asked, his voice rising above its relaxed murmur to something nearer surprised disappointment.

"I never thought about it," Mike admitted.

"Man..." Joel sank back against Mike's chest, and then rolled off him altogether, his shoulder sinking into the hollow of the beanbag he'd been resting on before.

Confused, Mike fumbled with his limbs for a moment to lean over, bracing himself on his palms and knees so that he was half bent over Joel, peering down at him quizzically.

"You left me because I didn't change the oil filter?" he asked in disbelief.

"Don't say _'left'_ like that," Joel groaned, turning his head aside so that he was all but burying his chin in the beanbag, in a transparent effort not to meet Mike's gaze. "Gosh. Like we broke up over it or something..."

"Well, is that a possibility?" said Mike. "'Cause I think I oughta know that now, before this gets serious."

"It's not getting _serious_. Geez." Joel huffed. If he were pouting any more, Mike would have expected him to start kicking his feet. "I dunno what to tell you, Mike. That me that you met, I'm not that guy. I'll never be that guy."

Mike wasn't sure if it was the effect of the pipe or Joel being especially Joel-like, but he was coming off more opaque than usual. "What's that mean?" he asked.

Joel rolled over onto his back, hands laced over his stomach. He looked up at his companion with eyes dilated, black and full of stars.

"Chaos theory," he said, slurring his consonants again. "A butterfly dreams he's a man in China and suddenly there's a hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico."

"Is that how that goes?" Mike asked, dubious.

"How much of the future have you changed just by being here, Mike? You know?" Joel lifted a hand and waved it in crooked figure-eights in the air between them. "And say it's not even the only time you change things. Say you go back again, and find me when I'm still at the Institute, and do something so's Doctor Forrester never sends me up into space..."

Mike shook his head side to side. He expected it to feel heavy, maybe, but really it just felt like it was full of cotton. "I'd never do that," he said. "Well... I mean, I wouldn't now, knowing that you like it here and all. I mean. The first time we met, when I asked you why you couldn't take me with you, you said it was 'cause these were the best years of your life."

"Yeah?"

"I thought it sounded really inspiring at the time, but later I figured you were just lying to get rid of me," Mike finished weakly.

Joel fell silent, and for a few seconds Mike wasn't sure if he was thinking or had actually nodded off.

"Well," Joel drawled after a while. "How dirty was the filter?"

Mike could not have resisted laughing if he wanted to. He giggled, which turned into a chuckle, and then the chuckle became a belly laugh, and then he was turning away, bent over his knees coughing.

Joel was up in an instant, kneeling next to Mike with a hand on his thigh, the other hand rubbing circles into his back.

"Speaking of filters," Joel muttered, presumably mostly to himself. "Hey, shh, you okay, buddy? Let's go get you some water, huh? Y'know, the shower should be working again too. You feeling hungry? I can make us some waffles while you go freshen up. And then we can watch _Silent Running_..."

Mike dragged as clear a breath into his lungs as he could manage, fighting down the last of the tickle in his throat. Beyond the bay windows of the observation deck, the stars were zigzagging about, although Mike was fairly sure that was from a sudden lack of air in his lungs, moreso than any fun side effects.

He gulped a few more breaths until his body felt like it had the hang of it again and then turned toward his companion. The stars in Joel's eyes were zigzagging too, though probably for still different reasons, as they read over Mike's face.

"...Joel."

It came out more like a rasp than a word, but Mike wasn't minding that just now. He stuck his hand over Joel's and recalled feeling the man's pulsepoint against his fingers just last night, how Joel had blushed and looked away, and he seemed ready to do that here as well. But not yet.

"Yeah, big guy?" Joel's hand tensed ever-so-slightly under Mike's grasp.

Maybe it was just the purple spots flashing against the back of Mike's eyes, playing with his vision, but he could swear Joel looked kinda cute right now. Definitely cute enough for Mike to do something foolish, to heap on top of the other dumb things he'd done lately.

"...Joel," said Mike, leaning closer. "If you're all right with it... I mean, if it's all the same to you, and you don't mind either way... If it's just a label, I mean... "

"Yeah?"

"Will you... Um. I mean." Oh god this was coming out all wrong and Mike couldn't get the words to stop now. "...Suppose we _did_ date? For real? Could that be a thing?"

The last question mark seemed to hang in the air for a slow eternity. Across from him, Joel blinked. He blinked again. Mike counted nine blinks in total, all in rapid succession.

After the nine blinks, Joel carefully slid his hand out from under Mike's and brought it up close to between their faces. Then he reached out and lightly grasped the soft tip at the end of Mike's nose, giving it a little wiggle.

"You're such a kidder," Joel said fondly, while Mike's heart sank into a puddle of bile. "Come on; let's go make those waffles."


	6. Day 5

**Day 5**

"I don't know what else to tell you, Mister Michael J. Nelson _'Senior'_ ," Tenisha said testily. "Your 'son' must be out on another of his nonexistent sick days. He hasn't turned up at his assignment all morning."

"Look, will you just take a message for me?" Mike begged, for what seemed like the tenth time that morning. As he paced the length of the desk again the cord wrapped itself even further around his midsection.

"We don't take messages for our temps," Tenisha repeated. "Why don't you try your 'son' at home, Mister Nelson?"

"Because I don't remember my -- I mean, Junior never gave it to his mother and me," said Mike, remembering to drop his voice back down a couple octaves for the right effect. "Do you, uh, happen to have it on file there?"

"We can't give out personal information on workers to anyone but law enforcement, sir."

_Dang it._ Mike chewed on his thumbnail, spun on his heel and started pacing back in the other direction. The phone wired into the bridge's communication relay was teetering dangerously close to the edge of the desk.

"Fine. I'll just... call back again soon," he ground out. "But just, please, as a personal favor, could you at least tell him I called? This is extremely, unimaginably, fate-of-the-world kind of important. Like, the kind Christopher Lloyd would shout cryptic things about. _That_ important."

"Whatever, Mike," Tenisha sighed, right before the line went dead.

Mike bit back a curse a little bit more severe than 'dang' and threw the phone at the floor. There was no give left on the cord, however, so after flying a few feet it sprang back like a bungee cord and sailed right into Mike's face.

"Oh, my," Gypsy exclaimed, drawn over by the piercing yelp following this collision. She glided over in time to find Mike crouched beside the desk, nursing a swelling red mark near the corner of his mouth. "I'll get the first aid kit!"

"Iff fine, Gyffsy," Mike managed through his hand cupping his mouth. The pain was actually not that bad, but geez, that cheap plastic packed a wallop. He tongued at the back of his teeth, just to be sure nothing was _wiggling_.

Despite his assurances, Gypsy was already zigzagging off to procure her nurse costume, which left Mike alone on the bridge again. He sighed, wincing at the tight and stinging feeling of his lip, and started pulling the tangled phone cord off himself.

So much for fixing things up before lunch today. If Mike knew himself -- and he hoped he did -- there was next to no chance that the younger Mike was going to show up at the office before closing time, meaning the soonest he could even try him would be tomorrow. Unless he could remember his own old phone number, but who actually wrote that down anywhere?

"..."

Mike felt the small hairs at the base of his neck start to prickle, as though he was being watched. Tonguing the back of his swollen lip, he craned his head to see over the top of the desk, taking a quick scan of the bridge. Nothing unusual there. The comm relay was a mess of wires and masking tape (Mike had needed to improvise after few widgets broke), Cambot was asleep over at his charging station, and everything else appeared to be still.

"Huh," he said, moments before thinking to check the ceiling.

"GET HIM!" Crow bellowed from somewhere behind him.

The net descended before Mike even had time to react. Shouting, he almost missed the sound of Servo's hoverskirt charging until the robot's small body was tackling him from behind, knocking him onto his stomach in a tangled mess of limbs and rope.

"Guys!" he yelped, as the burlap sack was yanked over his head. "Guys, this is a little extreme, don't you think?!"

"Hydrant Two to Eagle One!" Servo announced. "Target has been secured!"

"I'm right _here_ , Servo!" Crow snapped, sounding literally inches away. "Now, you get his head, I'll get his legs."

"Guys!" Mike pleaded, finding himself deftly manhandled onto his back and from there hefted into the air, despite a relative lack of either functional hands or dexterous beaks between his captors.

"It's time for a little 'education,' Mikey," Crow teased, barking out a series of short, mostly sinister laughs. "We're gonna make husband material outta you yet!"

* * *

"Did he say where he went?" Joel asked, using his fingernail to scrape at the corner of a particularly stubborn piece of tape. Why Mike had decided trying to 'repair' a sophisticated instrument like this was a good idea was beyond him.

"Not a word!" said Gypsy, ready with a spray bottle to dissolve the glue residue left on the console. "I came back to give him his injection and start the surgery and he was already gone!"

Joel refrained from explaining that getting smacked in the face with a phone probably didn't require invasive surgery, deciding it was beside the point just now. Besides, he was sure Gypsy knew, somewhere in her higher cognitive processes.

Anyway, the main point was that the comm relay panel was a mess and smelling of burned toast, and Mike -- who had apparently been hotwiring the bridge to place some expensive calls to Earth these last couple days -- was nowhere to be found. And that, together with being dragged out of bed at this unholy hour to contain a bridge fire, was ever so slightly harshing Joel's mellow.

"What about his calls, did he say anything about them?" he asked, continuing to stare moodily at the tape until it seemed poised to start peeling off all on its own.

"He swore me to secrecy," Gypsy said proudly, beside him.

Joel sighed through his nose and wadded more of the tape into a ball. For claiming to want to stay out of anything 'complicated,' Mike sure did seem to have trouble with keeping his affairs nice and simple. That talk in the greenhouse last night was a good example. Four days and he was already going from 'let's keep it casual' to asking if they wanted to _date_ date? Come on.

Not that the question was still sticking in Joel's mind like a stubborn popcorn shell on the roof of his mouth or anything like that. Nope, he wasn't giving it any thought at all. Besides, the answer was no, obviously: Joel didn't like commitments, not to other humans, and just because he'd said that Mike was a good reason to stick around the station didn't mean that he was actually considering something like-- _They were stranded in space, for gosh sakes._ It shouldn't even be on the table.

Besides, they'd known each other less than a week.

Even if it felt like way longer.

...But Mike could come unstuck in time again at any moment.

Not that he showed any signs of doing so.

...Well, even then, Mike was a klutz who could demonstrably leave bruises all over Joel's body _and_ make a mess of essential ship hardware just by looking at it. How he had survived aboard the Satellite of Love for years in his own timeline, Joel just didn't know. Luck and good looks, apparently. And it was true he could be a quick study with his mouth and fingers when he really put his mind to it, but... but...

_Oh, to heck with it._

Joel scowled, tossing another gnarled mass of tape and string into a garbage bag. He made a decision: as soon as he was done up here on the bridge he was going to find Mr. Golden Boy and settle this thing properly. Even if it left one of them sore tomorrow.

"Ooh! Incoming call!" Gypsy trilled, having wandered over to the desk. "Want me to put it on the main viewscreen, Joel?"

"Uh?" Joel looked up, yanked back out of his thoughts. Sure enough, over the doorway leading to the theater, the red call light was flashing. "Now who could that be...?"

"Maybe someone secret!" Gypsy suggested knowingly.

Oh, right, of course -- Mike's family, or whoever it was he'd been trying to look up in the phonebook the other night. Joel dropped the garbage bag at the side of the comm relay and flipped a few necessary switches.

"I'll take it over here, Cambot," Joel announced, as the forward viewscreen flickered to life. As Cambot emerged from his standby mode and floated over, Joel had just enough time to take in a blurry camcorder point of view darting across a ceiling before the image settled on a youngish, tallish, handsomeish man in blond hair and a cheaply tailored shirt.

"Hi," said the man on the screen, brow rippling with confusion. "Uh, sorry, I seem to've got the wrong number..."

_"Mike?"_

It _was_ Mike. There was no mistaking that. Sure, a few things seemed off -- he had neater hair, the office space he sat in looked like nowhere above the SOL, and he was wearing an ugly necktie -- but it was undeniably him.

"Oh, hey. Uh... sorry, name's not coming to me," said the Mike on the viewscreen, bearing Joel an apologetic smile which was just far too easy and friendly to be familiar. "Did we go to high school together?"

"No. No, I don't think so. Uh..." Joel shook his head, as things finally started clicking into place. "Look, I'm up here in space with your future self, I think."

"Ohh, that makes sense," the younger Mike said, nodding readily. "He said something about that. Said there was another guy up there with him."

"Yeah. Joel. Nice to meet you." There was no way this could not be awkward, Joel supposed, even if he weren't suppressing an urge to drop a bomb like _'by the way, I'm having sex with your older self.'_ Although the longer he looked, the cuter Mike seemed in that tie. "So he's been calling you to warn you about your future and stuff?"

"Aw, no, just trying to get back down to Earth. You know how it is. Can't get out of there fast enough! Apparently he found an escape pod I'm supposed to help him gain control of... He didn't tell you about all this?"

"...Not a thing," said Joel, chewing the inside of his cheek. There was a what, now? An _escape pod?_

"Well, that seems funny," the younger Mike decided. His frown was quick to vanish, however. "Anyway, this lady I used to date over at my staffing agency said he's been trying to get a hold of me all morning, but I woke up late and now it sounds like they're cancelling my assignment here, which is totally bogus... Reminds me of what happened at my last office temp job... At least that place had better bearclaws..."

As Joel watched, the younger Mike's gaze grew unfocused, staring off resentfully into some middle distance that Joel couldn't see. It seemed that Mike had been doing this temp thing for a long time, with predictable results.

"Um, so," Joel tried, "your future self's not here right now, but I can let him know you called?"

"That'd be great," younger Mike said, snapping back to the present without a hitch. "Uh, but my phone's out at home. Roommate forgot to pay the bill again. Just tell him he can reach me at Gizmonics when I'm up there on Saturday, like he said."

"You work at the Institute?"

This came as news to Joel. Mike had never fully explained why he was selected as Joel's replacement; Joel had just assumed the Mads had placed a 'Wanted' ad in the paper or picked someone off the street.

"Yeah, a couple mad scientists contracted me to help with their audit. Should bring in almost four twenty-five an hour! Er, but I should get going," younger Mike added, craning his head to observe something outside of his camera's field of view. "I think they're kicking me out soon and I still gotta make a run on the break room. It was nice meeting you, uh, Joel, was it? Hope you get out of that whole crappy movie experiment thing soon. Sounds pretty rough."

"Thanks, I think," Joel said, though before he got the last syllable out he was staring at a blank screen.

* * *

Meanwhile, in a shadowy, undisclosed location somewhere aboard the Satellite of Love...

"Vee have vays of making you talk, Mister Nelson!"

"Uh, I'm feeling pretty chatty already, don't think there's any need for that..."

"Silence!"

"But you just said--"

"Crow, let me handle this," Tom interrupted tersely. Powering his hoverskirt, he floated up to the level of the overhead lamp and tugged the string with his beak. A hot tungsten beam flicked on, falling upon the bound and hooded shape of one Michael J. Nelson, presently tied to a plastic folding chair.

"Is there any chance you could just let me go?" Mike wondered, his voice still muffled by the burlap.

"No," Servo answered flatly, lowering himself down back to about Mike's eye level, if Mike had the use of his eyes just then.. "Now -- Mike. Do you know _why_ we've brought you here today?"

"Uh, you're playing gangsters?" Mike guessed.

"Dang, he got us in one," Crow huffed.

_"Besides that,"_ Servo ground out. "You're here because we have plans for you, Mike, and you're going to carry them out."

"Is this about that whole 'dating Joel' thing again? Because you know that's not how relationships work, right? There's two people involved. Uh, minimum of two, I guess." Mike shifted in his chair, which was not exactly designed for his weight and could easily be broken with a bit of effort, but he seemed unwilling to go that far just yet. "Listen, I know you're still young and this whole 'one true love' business seems like a big deal to you guys right now, but when you get up to about Joel's and my age--"

"Silence! Crow, hit him."

Crow obliged, swinging his folded arm into Mike's side, which did nothing, but Mike humored him with a suitably loud grunt of pain anyway.

" _Ow!_ Come on, guys," Mike pleaded. "This whole coercion thing is _really_ not working in your favor."

" _We'll_ decide what's working in our favor or not, thank you very much," Servo retorted. "Now, it seems that our biggest problem here is _your_ lack of cooperation. What's the matter, Nelson, not ready to settle down?"

"Well--"

"Can't stand the thought of commitment? Thinking you still got some wild oats you want to sow? 'The domestic life? Naw, that's not for me, I want to have a career,' you say. Well, I got bad news, friend: that biological clock of yours is ticking down whether you like it or not! Crow, let's try Experiment A," Servo ordered, indicating the table of instruments the bots had prepared.

With a grunt of exertion, Crow retrieved the plastic baby from the tray and hefted it into Mike's lap. Its motor kicked on, making a tinny wailing noise as scraping gears moved its legs.

"The nurturing instinct is present in all human beings!" Servo declared. "Now, succumb to it! _Succumb!_ "

"I think this would work better if I was holding it," Mike said, above the grinding whir of the toy infant's leg joints. "Though, uh, not by much..."

Servo growled. "This one is a bust, Crow! Proceed to the next device!"

"Experiment B coming right up!" the gold robot announced, after nudging the motorized baby off Mike's lap with his beak. He returned a moment later, depositing a set of knitting needles and a spool of yarn.

"How's that feel, Mike?" Servo demanded. "Ready to start taking up domestic crafts, directing your creative energies into conventional pursuits for the home?"

"I can't even tell what this _is_ ," said Mike. "Could you at least take this sack off?"

"Another dismal failure! Crow, this calls for desperate measures. Give him... _the chicken pot pie recipe_."

"Ooh, pot pie?" Mike asked, suddenly brightening. "With homemade crust, or frozen?"

"Looks like it's from scratch," Crow reported, examining the procured 3"x5" notecard. "Thyme, rosemary, fingerling potatoes, ground sage..."

"Mm-hm, mm-hm," said Mike, nodding in approval. "Substitute some chanterelle mushrooms for a gourmet twist, some pearl onions for flavor... So, you guys want that for dinner tonight?"

"Boy, would we!" Crow exclaimed, before Tom could hush him.

"Mike," Servo said, "are you saying you _like to cook?_ "

"Oh, sure," Mike answered readily. "Nothing too fancy, just a few basic dishes. Chicken consumme, crab-stuffed lobster tail, pork chops with raspberry sauce..."

Crow made a noise like a dog whine. Tom had to admit he was starting to salivate as well -- metaphorically, at least. Joel was a fine enough cook if you didn't mind pancakes and boiled hot dogs, but if Mike was capable of even half the dishes he was listing off, then...

What could the possible downside be?

"Mike, you're cured," Servo declared. "I pronounce you ready for marriage. Undo his restraints, Crow, and get him to the kitchen!"

"I'm not marrying anyo--"

"We'll see about that later! _You_ , sir, have a dinner to cook. And can you make cut green beans with butter as a side?"

"Sure," Mike said immediately. "Sea salt or plain? Ooh, and should I add sliced cranberries? Hmm..."

* * *

Joel pushed back from his workbench and stretched, vertebrae popping one at a time all the way up to the base of his neck. Slumping back in his chair, he took in the progress on his current project: the long stool legs, the careful lines of black paint, the tooled rungs he still needed to fasten into place...

Since leaving the bridge, Joel had made a half-hearted effort to track down Mike and then retired to his cabin. The next Invention Exchange was up in a few days anyway, he told himself, and it wasn't like Mike could actually leave the station. Not without timeslipping, at least. Or getting access to that escape pod he had neglected to tell Joel about...

Joel huffed and tossed his paintbrushes onto the desk. It _shouldn't_ bother him, he reminded himself: Mike had appeared out of nowhere less than a week ago and hadn't made any secret of the fact that he'd prefer living out his days on Earth, so nothing about this should be revelatory at all. And apart from hiding from Joel what he was doing, there was really nothing about Mike's behavior that was all that transgressive or even rude. He was just doing what he could in order to leave, and who could blame him?

_I could,_ Joel's inner monologue volunteered. _I could blame him. Not that I'm going to, but you know, I_ could. _It's just the principle of the thing._

But no, he couldn't be that petty. Even if Mike had been stirring him up getting him to think about messy things like _commitments_ , while at the same time planning to blast out of here. Nope, Joel was not going to start harboring a grudge. He was not letting it bother him at all. Not a bit.

Joel rolled his head back and then sat forward again, picking up his brushes to resume his work. It wasn't much to focus on, but it was something that wasn't Mike, and that was a good enough start.

Only a few minutes later, however, Joel's ears pricked to the sound of the cabin door sliding open. He pointedly did not look up -- at least, not at first. Once the smell of fresh baked crust wafted over to him, his resolve crumbled.

"Hi," Mike said awkwardly, stopping near Joel's workbench. "Uh, you didn't come down for supper so I thought I'd bring some up for you."

Joel gazed up at the plate Mike held in front of him, as if he was witnessing something cut out of a Martha Stewart photospread. The plate contained a perfect miniature pot pie with a four-point star cut into the top of the crust, green beans topped with sliced cranberries, fresh mashed potatoes and sauteed spinach with... what were those, pine nuts?

"Whoa," Joel couldn't help but mumble. "Ah, geez... You didn't have to go to so much trouble..."

"Oh, it wasn't much," Mike answered modestly. He set the plate down at the corner of Joel's workbench, after Joel managed to clear some space for him. "Actually it just started out as something simple for the bots but then I got kinda carried away, I guess. They lost interest before I even finished the baked alaska."

"I didn't know you cooked," said Joel, already picking up the provided fork. Any resentment he may have been stewing in before Mike's arrival was put on the back burner for now -- after all, his stomach was sending a loud reminder that he hadn't eaten since breakfast. "I only know how to boil water and burn toast. Gosh, this is just... I don't think I've had a real home-cooked meal made by someone else since..."

Mike chuckled. "Hey, don't go all emotional on me."

Joel trailed off anyway, but only because he was unable to resist digging in any longer. Part of it was plain old hunger, but the rest of it was just how _good_ it looked. And it tasted about the same, all light and buttery and so sinful it belonged in some circle of Hell. The cubed carrots alone, good god.

"Thiff iff really grea'," Joel told his companion, with a mouthful of mashed potatoes. Mike beamed like a prized poodle at a dog show as Joel swallowed and continued. "You keep cooking like this and I'll be fat in no time."

"You got yourself a deal," said Mike, taking the spare chair beside the workbench to sit down adjacent to Joel. He was still grinning eagerly, watching Joel eat like it was the most rewarding activity in the world. "At least _someone_ around here enjoys it. The guys just checked out once I started adding in shiitake mushrooms and said they'd rather just have a ham sandwich instead. Can you imagine? After all that effort, finding a free-range chicken in this place..."

"Aw, I bet it's my fault," Joel said with an apologetic smile. He mentally glided over the chicken comment for the time being. "They're not used to having a real cook around the house."

_Not that they'll get a chance to get used to it anyway,_ the very un-zen part of Joel's mind chimed in, unbidden. His smile faltered.

"I dunno about _that,_ " Mike countered humbly, not appearing to notice. He rested his elbow on the workbench and cupped his chin in his hand. "But, heh, thanks. So, you been in here working the whole day?"

Joel was feeling his appetite for both dinner and small talk start to leave him, but he soldiered on, taking another bite and nodding. His parents had raised him both to be sociable and to not waste food and, darn it, he'd live up to that, even if Mike was a lying liar who lied and was going to leave him all alone and--

He cleared his throat, finished chewing, and swallowed. "Saturday's Invention Exchange," he explained, indicating the zebra-striped wooden stool beside him. The hidden machinery would take some elaboration, and he was never very good at articulating the mechanisms behind his inventions anyway, so he didn't even try. "The motorized playing cards weren't really working out, so I put that one aside for a while and built this. It's, uh, a Daktari Stool."

Mike arched an eyebrow. "You sure you wanna talk about that while you're eating?" he asked, making a face.

Joel snickered, hiding a grin against his shoulder. No matter how he was feeling about Mike just then, it felt good to successfully land a pun. Crow and Tom sure hadn't gotten it when he first showed them the blueprints.

"Maybe not," Joel answered, setting his fork at the edge of his plate. He studied his hands for a moment, debating if the question on the tip of his tongue was worth asking. Probably not, he figured, but he settled on asking it anyway. "Listen, Mike, I was on the bridge earlier and--"

His gaze drifted up and he stalled. Because Mike was _right there_ , having leaned in closer at some point so that when Joel looked up their noses almost brushed, mouths centimeters apart.

"Uh, sorry," Mike murmured, breath tickling softly over Joel's upper lip. He was blinking nervously, close enough that Joel could see that his eyes were green or gray or hazel or something, one of those funny in-between shades, but he didn't back away, but he didn't close the remaining distance between them, either. "Is this okay, or -- or -- should I stop, or..."

Joel made a small laugh that was mostly just a breath through his nose. A lot of things were getting unexpectedly complicated lately, but this part was pretty simple. Without hesitating he closed his eyes, tipped his head to one side and pressed his lips against Mike's.

The kiss was brief; light. The one after that lingered a little longer, still tentative, as Joel allowed Mike to set the pace. It was nice. Maybe on the chaste side. But it was ticklish, warm, and a little clumsy: all the things first kisses usually were. A bit of stubble scratching not-unpleasantly against his cheek. Mike's mouth still tasted like his dinner, but that was the opposite of a bad thing, Joel decided in that moment.

They parted for a breath and Mike sat back, sucking at his lower lip and rolling his tongue behind his teeth. He wasn't quite flushed, but he was getting there, his eyes dark and dilated with a coiled energy in his shoulders not unlike a cat sizing up a pounce.

"Hm," Mike said thoughtfully, still tasting his lower lip. "Little too much rosemary..."

Joel narrowly fought down the urge to chuckle. Or launch himself at Mike and show him how to _really_ deepen a kiss. Or, really, both at once. It was just too ridiculous. This, them, the dinner, his moping over the phone call, all of it.

He told him so. "You're ridiculous," he said, grabbing a fistful of Mike's jumpsuit and pulling him in for another go.

_This_ time there were a few more hazards involved when they kissed. Too many teeth and not enough air and so on. They managed anyway, sucking over various parts and twining others, exploring everything that their tongues could reach without it getting gross so that this time, when they broke off, they were both well and truly out of breath.

"Joel," Mike gasped, looking lightheaded. He reached out and placed his broad hands on Joel's thighs just above his knees, to balance himself after being pulled nearly out of his chair. "Listen. I... What if I said I found a way out of here?"

"I heard," Joel murmured, sobering. "The escape pod, right?"

Mike's forehead knitted together in confusion. "You know about that?"

"I got a call." Joel made a vague gesture with his hand. "From the... you know, the other you. Past you, except it's the present, or whatever, you know what I mean."

"Oh." Mike's gaze flicked downward, then to the side, taking a sudden interest in the corner of Joel's workbench. "I was gonna... I just had to figure out if it was going to work first, I didn't know you wanted to stay so badly, or I'd never have gone looking into it at all--"

"It's not that I want to stay up here forever," Joel corrected softly, resting a hand on Mike's shoulder. "It's just... I dunno, I figured if you were here--"

"No, no, I get it. I mean, I get it _now_ ," Mike clarified. He looked back up, meeting Joel's eyes again. "I think, anyway. I'm sorry for... moving too fast in the greenhouse last night..."

"You didn't," Joel lied. He felt the hand at his knee lightly increase its pressure, as Mike gave him a look. "Okay, yeah, you did," he admitted. "But that's not _your_ fault. _I'm_ just... I dunno."

_Kiss him again._

The corner of Joel's mouth twitched. That didn't _sound_ like his inner monologue, but he'd be darned if he knew where else the words were coming from.

"You're fine," said Mike, who didn't appear to have heard anything. "I just freaked out when I heard about the Joe Don Baker movie and... got ahead of myself. In _my_ timeline that's when you get evacuated. But whatever the Mads are planning, I'm sure we've got other options besides booting you off the station."

Joel's eyebrows shot up, as something finally slid into place for him. "Oh, _now_ I get it -- you thought my life was in danger! Aw, Mike, that's really... that's really sweet."

Mike's expression contorted in mortification. "That's not--" he protested. "I mean, I had the idea but I wasn't just--"

"Honey, I told you," Joel assured him, bracing him at both shoulders now. "We're safer up here than we'd ever be back down on Earth. I mean, sure, Forrester can cut off our air or send twenty thousand volts to our shammies at any moment, but he forgets about that stuff all the time! He's not gonna _kill_ me... It's just so cute for you to be concerned about that!"

Now Mike's face was going well past horror into looking like a roasted tomato. It wasn't very appealing, except that it was totally adorable, and gave Joel the wild (fleeting) thought of what tasting Mike's skin would be like, compared to his mouth.

_Kissss hiiiiim..._

There was that voice again. Joel frowned inwardly. It almost seemed like it was coming from the walls, but how did that work, exactly? Maybe he should ask Mike if he was hearing it too...

"Well, now I feel like a real dope," Mike confessed, dropping his gaze to his knees again. Or more precisely, Joel's knees, staring absently as he rubbed the pad of his thumb in a slow circle along the inside of Joel's pant leg. "Anyway, in the end it doesn't even matter. That's why I was trying to call my old self today: to call the whole thing off. I figured I was just... getting overexcited."

"It happens," Joel agreed. "No harm done. He said to call him when he's temping for the Mads on Saturday."

"Makes sense," Mike mumbled.

_Okay! Glad we got that all cleared up. Now kiss! Kissss!_

"...Come here," said Joel, deciding that the voice probably had the right idea just then, no matter where it was coming from. He touched two fingers to the side of Mike's jaw and drew him forward, rolling his lower lip against his and easing him into a slower, firmer kiss, the kind they could take their time with.

The kind of kiss, actually, that involved Joel leaving his seat and half-climbing into Mike's lap, and when that didn't really work out it became the kind of kiss that involved guiding Mike over to the bed, then down on his back over the comforter, with Joel straddling his waist. A very committed kiss, in other words.

"Ow," Mike grunted into Joel's mouth after a few minutes of this, jaw tensing in obvious discomfort under Joel's fingers.

Joel, dutifully, withdrew and gave Mike a bit of space. "Don't tell me your mouth's still sore from yesterday," he said, skeptical.

Mike gave him a faintly scandalized look, like he'd all but forgotten that encounter. "Nn, no, I, uh, hit myself in the face with a phone this morning," he explained, tapping a faint mark just left of his mouth. It was only starting to bruise, and it blended in so well with Mike's stubble that Joel just hadn't taken notice of it before, apparently.

"Oh yeah, I heard about that," said Joel, returning Mike's look with one of his own. Namely, a look that said _'you brought a lot of this on yourself by making your life complicated, you know.'_ "Lucky for you that you blew out of there before Gypsy turned up ready to start the surgery."

"Well, I kinda didn't have any choice in it..."

_"Caaaan you feeeeeel the looooove toniiiiiight..."_

Reclined on the bed, Mike stiffened, and not in the way Joel might've preferred. He craned his head, looking to the far wall of the cabin where the ventilation duct ran.

"You're _kidding_ ," he muttered.

Joel sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face.

_"The peace the eeeeeeveniiiiing briiiings..."_

"Okay, guys," Joel announced clearly, straightening up into a seated position. He was still straddling Mike's waist, but he wasn't leaving something _this_ comfortable unless the bots made him. "Come on out of the air ducts. The gig's up."

_"The world for once in perrrrrrrfeeeeect harmony..."_

Joel sighed. They were going to do it. They were going to make him climb out of this bed, where he had a deliciously helpless man currently pinned under him, and make him go drag them out of there.

"I'm gonna go get the broom," he told Mike, dismounting with obvious reluctance and a little discomfort. "You stay put."

* * *

In the end, Mike had to get up and help Joel dig the bots out of the air vent anyway. Servo, it seemed, had accidentally wedged his hoverskirt into a narrow part of the duct and refused to stop singing until the others could free him. He was all the way through _The Lion King_ and onto the soundtrack to _Beauty and the Beast_ before Joel and Mike came up with enough grease to pry him out.

"I hope you're proud of yourselves," Joel told his creations sternly, wiping Servo's hoverskirt clean with an oil rag. "The AC's gonna smell like french fries for a week now."

"Gosh, Joel, we didn't mean anything by it," Crow pouted. He had also emerged from the air duct a little worse for wear, nursing an arm which now didn't bend back all the way. But that was a much easier fix. "We just wanted to see if you and Mike got together!"

"Yeah!" Tom chimed in, still acting defiant. "Think about it from our point of view! We've been staked out waiting for this for days!"

"Hold on," Mike spoke up. "You mean you guys've been up that air duct before? _Watching_ us?"

"For how long?" Joel asked. Mike observed his hand tightening around Servo's neck component.

"Oh, two, three days," Servo answered casually, not noticing the pressure. "Just when you're in here together, of _course_. We wouldn't dream of interrupting your privacy. But if I say so, Joel, you and Mike have some _really_ weird workout routines..."

The color drained all at once from Joel's face. His expression, usually placid to a fault, seemed to harden, as his mouth pressed into a thin, white line.

Mike, meanwhile, was covering his face in his hands.

"That's what you thought we were doing?" Joel asked, in the same calm, easygoing tone he always had. Except the edges of his voice sounded strained. "Exercising?"

"Sure," said Crow. "I mean, what else could it be? What with all the sweating, the taking clothes off, the towels..."

"Panting and grunting and weird positions," Servo supplied.

"... _I_ thought you were dating the one time Mike kissed your area, but Servo told me that didn't count," Crow added helpfully.

"Yeah," Servo agreed. "But now that you've smooched the real way, the whole matter is cleared up and you can finally get married!"

"So it's all okay! Right?"

"Mike," Joel said curtly, shifting Servo's body to cradle him in one arm, while with the other he grabbed Crow by his chestplate. "I need to go have a little talk with my bots."

"By all means," said Mike, still feeling stricken in place.

As Joel dragged his creations out into the hall, Mike found a way to get his knees to unstick and feebly made his way into a chair again. Once there, he sank his face into his hands again.

"'Kissed your area,'" Mike repeated, mortified. He scrubbed at his cheeks with the heels of his palms and groaned.

At least he didn't envy Joel's task of giving the bots 'the talk,' which is what he assumed was going on now. Mike wasn't sure where things had started to change, but he couldn't even _conceive_ of the Crow and Servo from his own timeline reacting like that. Had they really ever been this innocent? ...And did this mean that without Mike's influence, they always would have been?

Well. One way or another, Joel _had_ said he knew he needed to tell them someday. So maybe this was all for the best, in a weird way...

Mike breathed out slowly and allowed his hands to fall into his lap. Lifting his head, he frowned in the general direction of the far wall and reflected that, at least, he and Joel _did_ end up kissing. So that was progress.

"...Heh."

He straightened up, scratching a hand through his hair. So, kissing Joel. That had been pretty neat. Granted, it had come with the stipulation that Joel still wasn't interested in commitments -- but Mike was calling it a positive step, nonetheless. And they'd established that neither of them were going anywhere, so that was a big weight off. Now they just needed to get through Saturday's experiment somehow, and everything would work itself out. Probably.

So, on the whole -- the bots' grievous privacy violations aside -- things were seeming pretty good for Mike. For once. Not the best, but... pretty nice. Worth relaxing over.

Of course, as soon as he allowed himself to think that, the universe blinked out around him.


	7. Day ???

**Day 5515**

Mike opened his eyes and searing white light invaded his retinas. He squeezed them shut again, gasping and struggling backwards on smooth tile.

"Roger that. He'll be joining you shortly."

He lifted the corner of one eye the tiniest fraction, squinting through the white noise seeming to come at him from all sides. Gradually, he could discern where the floor and floor met, and from there he could make out a hallway -- and dark suited figures, maybe a half dozen of them, standing at the far end or the corridor.

"So, in the meantime," continued the voice Mike had heard before. It was a man's voice, in every way nondescript, professionally amicable in the same way a tour guide is friendly when he knows no one can run away from the group. "Have fun and don't forget to--"

"Yeah, put the nanotated disc in the Time Tube. We got it," came another voice from amidst the suited figures. And _this_ one, Mike recognized.

"Joel?" he called out, staggering forward. He could still only barely open his eyes, discerning the suited figures as warping, indistinct outlines. They were standing outside a matte black door, the head of the group fiddling with some sort of radio device at his wrist. The other shapes, something was familiar about them as well, but... there was that _one_ , slouching near the front, it couldn't be anyone else-- "Joel!"

Up ahead, one by one, the dark suited figures turned him. Mike's heart lurched to a halt and lodged itself his throat. He saw... it couldn't be...

"Can I help you?" ventured the man with the radio watch.

Mike shook his head, not in answer, just to try to get the light from bleeding through everything. It _couldn't_ be all of them, that was _ridiculous_ , this was some sort of--

It was too much. Mike's mind began to shut down, and in the process started to block out the things that didn't compute. Unfortunately, that didn't leave much left for him to hang onto -- just the one, that slouching figure near the head of the group, the voice he was sure he recalled--

"Joel!" he persisted, calling toward that darkened shape. How could they all be in shadow when the hallway was so bright? The only thing that seemed to reflect light were the man's oval glasses, which flashed with the tilt of his head. Joel didn't wear glasses. But. "Joel, it's me! It's Mike!"

"Excuse me, but you're not supposed to be back here," the man with the radio watch said sternly. "The theater is restricted to authorized personnel only."

"Theater...?"

Mike blinked his eyes a few times, flashing purple after-images darting back and forth as he struggled to make out more than the edges of the figures in front of him. Joel -- or the man in the glasses who stood like Joel -- was watching him, but not speaking.

"Who's this guy?" asked the only other figure in the group who seemed unfamiliar. He was tall, with a square face and geometrically precise block of black hair.

"Just don't engage him, please," the man with the radio watch ordered, striding forward. He pressed something on the face of the watch, bringing the device close to his lips. "I have unauthorized entry in C27, repeat, unauthorized entry in C27..."

Mike started to back up. A bang sounded behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder to see two more dark outlines rushing toward him from the open door at the far end of the hall. Both bore the approximate build of linebackers and had some sort of billy club attached at their belts. 

Cold panic slid down Mike's spine. He tried to run, but his legs were frozen beneath him. By the time he managed to move, the guards were already on him, hurtling him bodily to the floor.

"Joel!" Mike wheezed, fighting against the guards' weight even as they pinned him and wrenched one arm behind his back. His ribs were on fire, all the air was knocked out of his lungs. "Joel, please!"

The man with the glasses bowed his head, lenses becoming two oblong crescents which barely illuminated a face with a familiar brow, a familiar nose, and far less hair than Mike remembered.

"You shouldn't be here, Mike," the older Joel said, as the lights bled together and a pounding filled Mike's ears.

* * *

**Day 2123**

"Deck five broken away!" Servo shouted from navigation, his little body tossed back and forth as the steering wheel swung wildly in each direction. "Deck six broken away!"

Beyond the conn, the Satellite of Love's forward viewscreens were a field of fire, their panes bubbling and melting as the last of the heat shields began to fail. The station lurched hard to starboard, forcing Mike to tumble forward, barely managing to grapple purchase on the edge of the desk.

"Deck seven melting _and_ broken away!" Servo continued.

"Gypsy!" Mike found himself shouting. "What do we do?!"

The serpentine bot swung toward the navigation console as the SOL rolled hard to port. "We burn up horribly! It's too dreadful to contemplate!" she shrilled. "Oh my god in heaven, please have mercy on our souls!"

Near the forward viewscreens, the comm relays were vomiting sharp gray smoke. Mike struggled to steady himself, mind racing to process the scene around him.

He was here again. He remembered this moment. The project. The satellite. Reentry. He was back again.

"I'll call Joel," he announced to the bots, sounding calmer than he was.

"Joel?" Servo repeated, snapping his head around toward Mike. "What's he going to do in a time like this, Mike?!"

"I, I dunno, he helped us out before--"

_"We don't even have his number, Mike!"_

"Geez, really? Why didn't I ever ask for that? Seems like such an obvious thing in retrospect--"

"Toxic gas filling the bridge," Gypsy cried, as clouds of smoke began to obscure their field of vision. "I think this is it, boys!"

The explosions redoubled in volume, every beam of the bridge creaking as the very foundations of the ship began to disintegrate.

"Deck nine crashing through decks ten and eleven!" Tom reported.

Crow looked up from the other side of the bridge desk. "Mike, have you seen my other sweater?"

"We're going to _die!_ " someone screamed. And it wasn't until all the noises and klaxons ceased, leaving him tumbling forward into blank silence again, that Mike realized it had been him.

* * *

**Day ???**

He fell an infinite distance, for uncountable time.

No ground rushed up toward him, no wind whistled in his ears. When he yelled, the sound was empty and flat, no echo, like shouting into a snowfall.

After some time, he heard a throat clear behind him.

Mike twisted around, and wasn't entirely surprised to see one of those purple-robed Observers staring him down, pasty white receding chin wobbling in callous judgment. The weird thing -- or anyway, the one thing that stood out at the moment -- was that his robes weren't fluttering in any direction, though he kept exactly apace with Mike's descent. Which was when Mike figured out he wasn't actually falling at all.

Righting himself awkwardly, Mike extended a foot and felt it land flat on an unseen floor. Wobbling for balance, he lowered his other foot and began brushing down his jumpsuit, regarding the Observer sourly.

"You know, you could have said something earlier," he said.

"Earlier than when?" the Observer countered. Mike couldn't be sure, given how they all looked alike, but this one seemed to be the same Brain Guy who followed Pearl around. He carried his brain in front of him like all the others, of course. "Time and space don't exist for us currently, young Mister Nelson."

"Yeah, yeah. So if you could step in this whole time, why have you waited till now to do it?" Mike demanded. "I've been timeslipping like this for _months_. I thought I finally stabilized when I landed in '95 with Joel, so now what?"

"You presume I have any more control over your movements than you do," said Brain Guy. "The fact of the matter is, your coming unstuck in time was a complete fluke; a defragmentation error of the universe. And the more you go about changing the course of history, the more you risk destabilizing not just your timeline, but the entire multiverse!"

That... sounded plausible enough to Mike, for as far as he could follow it. He had actually been entertaining similar fears on his own, about altering the future. But that was exactly what he'd been planning to stop -- to call off the plan with his younger self -- before he got tugged into other times and universes like this again.

Apparently, intention didn't count for very much.

"So help me out here," he implored. "How do I set things straight?"

Brain Guy scoffed. "If I told you, you'd just go about finding a way to muck things up even _worse_ , horrible clod that you are. Just don't touch _anything_. I'll deal with the rest."

This should have sounded like a relief, but the moment Mike thought about it, he got a strange clenching feeling in his gut. "By 'deal with,' you mean... undo all of it?" he asked.

"Yes, naturally. History must take its course," Brain Guy answered. "Fortunately, you're just one ordinary, mortal buffoon, so this is all still within my power to correct -- for now."

"Oh, so, two or more people, and you're suddenly not omniscient enough," Mike deadpanned.

The Observer's nose scrunched up in affront. "I most certainly can handle the timelines of more than one lower lifeform such as yourself!" he declared. "I'm just... out of practice, that's all!"

"Uh-huh," said Mike. "So can you just drop me off where I was before, while you go about reworking the fabric of time and space and all that? Uh, not where I was about to burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Or that creepy place with the white hallways..."

"Fine, fine," Brain Guy harrumphed. "But if you continue to create these ripple effects I shan't be able to guarantee you'll remain anywhere for very long, so tread carefully! Oh, why do I even bother..."

Deciding the conversation was over, the Observer lowered his head and fixed Mike with a gaze of hard concentration. Mike heard the characteristic supersonic warbling fill his ears, and then everything went black again.


	8. Day 6

**Day 6**

"You're wandering again."

Mike peeled open his eyelids slowly, feeling a gummy residue beneath them that seemed to make them stick to his eyeballs and everything else. The lavender recessed lights of the observation deck twinkled back at him, high above leafy fronds and a curling wisp of pungent smoke. In the periphery, beyond the bay windows, the universe glimmered.

He was reclined back on a beanbag chair with his hands laced across his stomach. His head was resting against something warm, but sort of lumpy. The pillow shifted every so often, and the material was coarse, like the fabric of a jumpsuit.

Mike squinted and refocused on the dark red shape occupying a corner of his vision.

"How can you tell?" Mike croaked, peering up at Joel's silhouette from his vantage point in his lap.

"Oh, it took me a while to figure it out," Joel answered easily. He held his pipe aloft in one hand while the other continued smoothing through Mike's hair. "Actually I only pieced it together just now. Before, I thought when you went to a different time it'd be like blinking in and out of place, but it's not really like that, is it? It's more like you just space out and fade for a while..."

"Is it?" Mike wondered. He tilted his head back, not feeling in any particular hurry to leave Joel's lap or do anything, really. Lying here, with the heady smell and warmth of the smoke from Joel's pipe settling around him, he felt like he could drift off all over again. "I can't tell."

"Maybe you do the vanishing act more at night," Joel suggested. "When you're asleep. It only seems to happen when you're really relaxed."

"I'm relaxed now," Mike pointed out. "Wonder why I don't remember the other times... These were horrible. I saw Brain Guy again."

"Who's that?"

"He's this... guy. With a brain. Like he keeps it in a big petri dish and carries it with him."

"Gross," Joel said, curling his fingers through Mike's hair, so that he lightly scratched along his scalp. "So was he real, or like the crab people, or..."

"No idea."

With effort and a certain amount of reluctance, Mike started to pull himself up from Joel's lap -- something he only managed by effectively crawling over the rest of Joel's body, until he was half atop him, half seated beside him. He gestured to his companion's pipe, accepting it with a grateful hum and drawing deep while Joel ran a lighter over the blackened bud for him.

Mike held the smoke in his lungs until it started to burn and exhaled slowly, allowing the remaining tension in his shoulders to filter away with it. Joel took the pipe to set aside, and when he looked back, Mike's lips were on him.

Joel relaxed unhesitatingly into the kiss, his eyes falling closed and his lips parting to let Mike in. Time seemed to spread out and flatten for them, turning into an exploration of tongues and teeth, noisy breaths, fingers in hair, too many elbows and layers of clothing. That sort of thing.

At some point, Joel lay back, dissolving into a boneless human ragdoll who groaned every time Mike dragged his teeth over his lower lip or pinched his nipples through the fabric of his jumpsuit. He gasped wetly when Mike ventured lower, tugging down the collar of his turtleneck to again place a sucking bite over that red, tender spot on his throat.

"Mmm, Mike," Joel moaned eventually, fingers bunched tightly in the shoulder of his companion's jumpsuit. "Let's go to our room."

"Nope, too far away," Mike rumbled, his voice deep and scratched. He pushed himself up off of Joel only enough to work open the buttons to the other man's suit. "I was just thinking: maybe the reason I came back here... maybe the reason I'm not traveling more often..." He didn't finish that thought, because he just couldn't, it wasn't the right time, and also he was very, very hard. "Say, d'you have any condoms for... inside stuff?"

"Inside...?" Joel repeated, his eyes clouded with arousal and confusion. It took a few seconds for his brow to lift, as he picked up on Mike's meaning. "Oh... Oh. I dunno, Mike, I don't think that's such a great idea..."

"Why not?" Mike asked, his hands hesitating over Joel's belt.

"'Cause, it takes a lot of prep work, and I haven't done it in a while, and..." Joel dragged a hand through his hair -- his shaggy, unkempt brown hair which seemed so long and youthful compared to that figure Mike had met just minutes or years before. "Why all of a sudden, anyway?"

"I don't know," Mike admitted. "When I was unstuck, I met this other you and... and then Brain Guy told me not to try to fix the future, to just stay right here, and..." He met Joel's gaze hopefully, willing a spark of understanding between them, since words were just a tangled mess right now.

Something flickered in Joel's eyes. There was a familiar warmth there, compassion if not exactly total comprehension, that was so different than the figure Mike had glimpsed in that other time and place. He smiled his soft, amiable smile, eyelids drooping so low they almost appeared closed.

"...Ehn, why not," he murmured, hands falling at his sides. Then he started digging into the pockets of his jumpsuit, quickly producing bright foil squares and little plastic tubes, the sheer quantity and dimensions of which seemed to defy the size of the pockets they emerged from. "Just try to start slow, all right?"

Mike's eyes bulged at the growing multitude of sex aids scattered across Joel's stomach. "You just carry all that around with you?" he asked.

"Sure. Never know when you might need it," said Joel, laid back as ever, but with an impish glint in his eyes. He started pushing a handful of sample-size bottles and prophylactics into Mike's hands. There was even a sterile packet of latex gloves for him to use. "Oh-- it's all water-based, so remember to use a lot."

Mike looked down at the jumble of bottles in his arms and then back to Joel, who was busy wriggling out of his jumpsuit. This was turning into way more than he bargained for, Mike realized, especially right after falling through time and space -- but he couldn't think of a good reason to beg out of things now, so he might as well roll with it.

And -- once their clothes were done away with and Joel was properly sprawled out on his stomach, with Mike's chest pressed to his back and his fingers inside him -- things got a lot less complicated and started feeling simply _good_. Joel was quiet through most of it, moaning and sighing softly as Mike worked him open, and crying out only once when Mike started pushing in with his cock.

"Slower! ...Slower," Joel gasped, fingers digging into the bean bag chair beneath him, which made for a comfortable surface but hardly offered Mike any leverage to thrust with.

"Sorry," Mike groaned, squeezing his eyes shut. He braced his hands to either side of Joel's head and tried moving in shallower circles, but he was met with too much friction again, and he withdrew. Settling back on his knees, he lifted his gaze again and murmured a few half-sentences about something else they could try.

With a bit of rearranging, they settled into a position on their sides, with Joel's leg bent forward and Mike spooned against his back. This time, it went a lot easier -- Mike held his breath and rolled his hips in small, incremental movements, Joel pressed his face into his arm, and within a few labored, dizzying minutes Mike's hips were flush against him, buried inside as deep as their position would allow.

"All right?" Mike panted, his mouth pressed clumsily against Joel's shoulder.

Joel made a small grunt into the crook of his elbow. "Gimme a second," he managed.

"No prob." He circled an arm around Joel's waist and left it at rest there, eyes falling closed again. It wasn't difficult, high as he was, to just focus on the warmth of Joel's skin and the constricting heat inside him; to luxuriate in that for a few moments without the need to try moving his hips. It had been just so long-- he'd almost forgotten--

"...this other me..."

Mike raised his head, with effort, as it seemed to weigh ten times what it had just a moment ago. Lifting his eyelids again was even more of an ordeal. After all this to-do, he was nearly falling asleep again.

"Mmhuh?"

"You said you met another me," Joel clarified, his voice still muffled against his arm. "What was I like?"

"I'm not sure it was really you," Mike said carefully. "The same you, I mean. Things were really different. You had glasses and..."

"Really?" Joel asked, raising his head just enough to peer at Mike over his shoulder. The side of his cheek was red where it had been pressed against his arm. "Well, that's definitely some mirror universe business. Did I have a goatee too?"

"I don't think so. _I_ do, but that's... uh, another version somewhere," said Mike, with a vague shrug. "How're you feeling?"

"Huh... better," Joel said, as though only just recalling he had someone's sex organ stuffed up inside him. Probably an easy enough thing to forget when you were Joel, especially as baked as he presently was. "This was a good idea, doing it from this angle. I gotta remember it when it's your turn."

" _My_ turn?" Mike repeated in mock-protest, as he started to move. His hips jutted forward and connected flush with the back of Joel's thighs, driving him in deeper, and causing Joel to let out an incoherent stammer. "What makes you think I'll say yes to that?"

"Hhhn, you say yes to everything. It's one of the -- aah -- things I like about you." Joel shuddered visibly, gooseflesh appearing across his back and shoulders as Mike started to find a good rhythm for both of them.

Mike drew his tongue deliberately across the raised skin of Joel's closest shoulder, enjoying the hiccuping noise Joel made as he did so. "Say more about that," he murmured in his ear.

In the back of Mike's mind, the thought lingered that this may not be strictly in keeping with Brain Guy's instructions to him. But surely he hadn't meant his proscription _literally_ , and anyway, Mike was already too involved -- in a number of ways -- to think about stopping now. Not with Joel arching and groaning against him like this, vyse-tight around Mike's shaft, muscles rippling and clenching around him so sharply Mike was soon fighting back the urge to come. He lost track of most most of his thoughts in the midst of that.

"Mike--" Joel keened, head tossed back with the lines of his throat drawn sharp, the refreshed bruise on the side of his neck bright red and coated in sweat. Mike would bite him again if he only held still, but Joel was already fidgeting and turning about again, words dying at his tongue.

Giving up on articulating himself for now, Joel twisted his upper body instead, grabbing at Mike's bicep and pulling him closer until Mike was not so much spooned against him as leaning over him, bent over his shuddering body with his knees on the floor. The extra leverage allowed Mike to thrust harder and deeper, though not at the right angle to stimulate Joel from inside as before -- not that he seemed to mind. He wasn't hard at all, though his lower stomach was soaked with precome and his entire chest was flushed a dark red.

Mike had never seen him like this before. But he sensed, instinctively, that he'd seen a hint of it, back when they had stood in Joel's quarters and Mike had held his gaze while tugging off his shirt... The way he'd grown shy and pliant under Mike's fingers, begging wordlessly for a firm hand...

Mike bent down and caught Joel's mouth into a hard kiss, which seemed to be the correct response. Joel responded in kind, scraping his lips with his teeth, sucking on his tongue, panting into Mike's mouth in a way that was almost feral.

"Mike," Joel gasped again, stirred out of biting all the way through his companion's lip only because Mike's hands had drifted to his chest again, massaging and pinching his small, dark nipples in that way that Joel really, _really_ seemed to like. He wrapped his arms around Mike's shoulders, with no regard for how his nails dug in. "I'm so -- I'm really glad -- you came here... It's good that we met like this--"

"Joel," Mike groaned, the edges of things going white and fuzzy as, despite the faint pain spreading across his back, he was nearing his limit.

"I don't -- care if you don't change the filters, or if you tried fixing the comm relay with tape... or if you time travel sometimes... You're still a really great guy... And a great cook... I guess -- what I'm saying is--"

"Joel, I'm gonna--!"


	9. Day 7, Part 1

**Day 7**

It was officially too early for either of them to be awake. _Especially_ on an experiment day, really, when Joel would prefer to just sleep through the entire experience, if that were an option.

And yet here he was, standing on the bridge with an equally haggard Mike, neither face shaved and a couple mugs of soggy coffee grounds between them (since Joel still hadn't managed to fix the coffee maker). Gypsy had declared them both death warmed over the moment she saw them, which really did not help.

Joel scrubbed at the stubble along his jaw and wished that at the very _least_ he could get off his feet for a bit. But that wasn't happening either, for reasons.

"Damn..."

Beside him, Mike grimaced and reached back to scratch a spot between his shoulders where, a few hours earlier, Joel surmised he had dragged his nails just a bit too hard.

"Hurts?" Joel murmured, chin cupped in his hand as he rested -- carefully -- against the desk.

"Nah," said Mike, massaging the tender spot just below his neck. "Just itches."

"Well, don't scratch, anyway. You'll make it worse," Joel warned gently, frowning into his palm. It was hard not to feel a little guilty about Mike's discomfort, seeing as he caused it. "We'll get you some cortisone once we're off the phone here."

More like, once they were off hold. With Joel's help managing the damaged comm relay, Mike had successfully dialed through to the Happy Time Temp Agency the moment the weekend desk agent -- not Tenisha -- had walked through the door, but there the last of their good luck ran out. After promising to do his level best to track down the younger Mike Nelson before he headed up to his assignment at Gizmonic Institute, the desk agent had put the warbling hold music on and just wandered away somewhere. And that was over twenty minutes ago.

Twenty _long_ minutes with Joel on his feet, leaning on the desk and doing his best not to move. But even that was starting to hurt. He shifted his weight on his feet and tried stretching some of the stiffness out of his back -- and immediately regretted that decision, as the sharp aching sensation at the base of his spine redoubled and drove hot knives through his pelvis and backside.

Joel tried, and failed, to suppress the groan of pain that followed.

Now it was Mike's turn to look guilty. Brow drawing together in concern, his arm dropped back down at his side and he looked over at his companion, watching him carefully as though he might tip over at any moment.

"Sorry about, um," he said.

"It's fine," Joel answered sluggishly. "I knew this would happen, so..."

"Think you'll make it through the movie okay?"

Joel allowed his eyes to fall shut -- not that they had far to fall -- and enjoyed the heaviness of his eyelids for a moment, wishing he could just _not open them_ again any other time today. 

"Mm, might need some Tylenol," he said. "And a bowl, probably. But that's normal for movie days."

"You know, I never really figured you for the 'wake and bake' type. But here you are..."

"Aw, hey now, I'm not like that," Joel objected, aware that it came out sounding like a pout. Under normal circumstances he wouldn't have allowed the comment to get him on the defensive, but he was running on negative amounts of energy today. "Normally it's only for experiment days. This week was just different, that's all."

"Well, I guess a man appearing out of nowhere in your bedroom _is_ kind of a weird way to start the week," Mike agreed, nodding sagely. "Sorry about that. But hey, while we're waiting, you want a massage?"

This prompted Joel to finally peek open one eye, giving Mike the most skeptical side-eye that he could muster through his fatigue. He'd sounded completely earnest, but that was what made the proposal even weirder.

"Oh, go on," Joel drawled.

"No, really," Mike insisted. "Apparently I'm really good at it."

Joel rocked his chin against his palm, considering his companion (they really needed a better word than that) for a long moment. Probably, if he were more awake just then, Joel could invent a clever comeback about knowing quite well how talented Mike's fingers were, but nothing was coming to him at the moment.

_...Eh, why not._

"Sure, okay," he mumbled, eyes sliding shut again as Mike shuffled over behind him.

There was a pregnant pause, wherein Joel subconsciously bunched up his shoulders in anticipation of feeling Mike's hands on him, and when Mike finally _did_ press his fingers into the small of Joel's back, the sensation was so startling that he nearly jumped a few feet forward. Which did his sore backside no particular favors.

"Whoa, easy," Mike murmured near Joel's ear, rolling his thumbs in a firm circular motion right above his pelvis. From there he moved up along the column of Joel's spine and back down again, focusing on those few square inches right around waist level which seemed to ache the most. "I've never seen you this wound up. And by that, I mean at all."

"M'only human," Joel muttered, dropping his hand from his cheek and resting his entire weight on his arms while Mike continued work on his lower back. And, despite his previous skepticism, after he adjusted to the pressure Mike's fingers really _did_ seem to be easing some of the tension out of his muscles. It couldn't do much for some of his more, er, _internal_ aches and pains, but the worst of the soreness in his back started to dissipate, at least. Slowly. Getting a little better each time Mike pushed just so at the tight knot of muscles at the base of Joel's spine.

"How's that?" Mike asked, his voice floating from somewhere, Joel couldn't be certain.

"Mmmn. Lower," said Joel, his head hanging forward. Mike complied, and a pleasant tingling shot up the entire length of Joel's back. "There. Push. Push hard." He felt Mike's knuckles drive right into one spot which was so tender that it fell just short of pain. He shuddered. "Dig it in there, Mister Spo--"

He broke off abruptly, as on the far side of the bridge someone pointedly cleared their throat.

Mike's hands withdrew immediately, to Joel's surprise and, quickly, disappointment. Joel lifted his head and opened his eyes to find pretty much what he expected: Crow and Servo lingering over by the starboard viewscreens, watching knowingly.

"Hey, when were you guys gonna announce yourselves?" Joel demanded. He was not above scolding them again, but he really wanted the coffee to take effect before he got to that point.

"Eventually!" Crow answered, as Tom snickered into his shoulder. "If you didn't sabotage all the ship's surveillance cameras we wouldn't have to sneak around, now would we?"

"We have surveillance cameras?" Mike wondered.

Joel pinched the bridge of his nose, resisting the urge to get dragged off-topic. "Now, what did I say the other night, you two?" he asked the bots. "Mike and I have a right to privacy when we have our special grownup time."

"Aw, but it's so fun to watch!" Servo protested, waxing wistful. "Even when we didn't know what we were looking at! It's like those late night animal documentaries about the mating habits of hyenas or strange venemous butterflies..."

"Yeah!" Crow agreed.

"'Special grownup time'?" Mike quoted back at Joel, sounding scandalized. " _That_ was the talk you ended up giving them?"

"Hey, I'm a first-time parent! So I made up a few words; they still got the general gist of it," said Joel, now getting entirely too defensive. He bunched up his shoulders and turned his attention back to his creations. "And they know Mike and Joel's special grownup time is only for Mike and Joel, _don't they?_ "

Crow and Servo exchanged a look and sagged, replying in dreary unison: "Yes, sir."

"Mister Nelson Senior? Hello?"a reedy voice intoned over the comm system, as the tinny muzak stopped. "Thank you for holding, Mister Mike's Dad. I'm afraid I wasn't able to reach your son."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second! Mike has kids too?!" Crow enthused, perking up at once. "This changes everything!"

"Oh, man, a blended family, how _modern!_ " Servo cheered. "We'll be like the Brady Bunch!"

 _"'Here is the story, of a handsome janitor--'_ " Crow sang.

 _"Who was bringing up four very handsome bots--"_ Tom continued.

"Now, that's enough outta you!" Joel warned severely, leaving Mike's side at the desk to bodily remove the two from the bridge if necessary. Or at least hold their beaks closed until the call was over.

"So he's already left for Gizmonics?" he heard Mike ask the agent on the phone.

"Seems that way," the agent answered. "Do you need the number for their main building?"

"No, we got a direct line," Joel shouted, over the din of two muffled, flailing bots in his arms. "Thanks for your time!"

There was a pause on the other end of the line, presumably as the temp agency's desk clerk tried to process the multiple voices going on in the background. Then, just as suddenly, the man mumbled a confused farewell and hung up.

"Dang," said Mike, after Joel rejoined him at the desk, none the worse for wear save a few beak-shaped bite marks around his fingers. "That means the only way to reach him is when the Mads will be around."

"We'll figure something out," said Joel. He winced, as the pain in his backside started up again -- a delayed reaction for all that moving about just now. He reached an arm behind him to rub at the small of his back. At least the soreness above his pelvis was doing better. "Hey, that massage of yours really helped."

"It works better without your..." Mike glanced past Joel's shoulder, where the bots stood grumbling. "Eh, we'll get back to that later. Look, when the Mads _do_ call, let's keep me out of sight, all right? We just gotta figure out a way to get younger me on his own, and then explain everything..."

Joel arched an eyebrow. "Everything?"

Mike took his meaning and went a little pink around the ears, but he bore Joel a coy grin nevertheless. "Okay, not _everything_ ," he said. "Just the pertinent stuff. Let's not blow my younger self's mind yet."

* * *

The initial call from Forrester and TV's Frank went off roughly without a hitch, although Joel seemed faintly disappointed about not having more time for his Invention Exchange. Mike had been correct about the Mads being audited today, but the sheer apathy on Frank's part even hearing about the Daktari Stool seemed to put Joel off his game a bit. Being overtired as he was probably didn't help, granted.

Interacting with the younger Mike as though they had never met was even more of a challenge, but only for Mike-the-temp's utter lack of a poker face -- a skill that Mike-the-time-traveler really thought he had picked up over the years, in contrast to his younger self. Not that there was much he could do about it, crouched as he was behind the door of the bridge airlock while Joel stammered ineffectually through a series of only barely veiled hints.

"Boy, it sure is nice to meet you _for the first time_ , Mike," Joel said slowly and emphatically. "I sure have _never seen you before in my life_."

"Uh, okay," said younger Mike, his face so knotted up in confusion he looked like a slab of lumpy dough. "Sure. So... Is there anything you wanted, or..."

"We don't let them make requests, Mike," Frank snapped, bodily shoving Mike-the-temp away from the camera. "Now get back to work!"

"Oh! Uh, Mike?" Joel tried desperately, before younger Mike was completely out of view. "Uh, you just... work hard and don't do anything special on our account, okay?"

"Really?" Mike-the-temp asked, puzzled, as Frank hounded him behind a row of filing cabinets. "What about the thing with the--"

" _Totally_ don't know what you're talking about, man I just met!" Joel shouted, before younger Mike could finish. Mike-the-time-traveler had to hand this to him, at least: Joel while stoned could be a lot more adamant about things. "Oh hey, look, we got Movie Sign!"

Crow gave the call buttons on the desk a hard look. "No we don't," he reported.

"Sure we do, any second now," Joel maintained, with a firm nod.

"Yeah, but--"

Mike-the-time-traveler breathed a sigh of relief as the Movie Sign klaxons sounded from overhead -- about the one and only time in his life he was happy to hear that panic-inducing noise. He pressed his hands to his ears and moved away from the airlock as the klaxon reverberated throughout the ship's hull, only barely able to discern the pounding of Joel and Crow's feet or the hiss of the theater doorway sliding open up above him.

Mike waited until the sirens faded away, then pulled the lever to fully dilate the aperture of the bridge-side airlock door. Climbing back onto the bridge, he remained crouched near the floor behind the desk and slowly, ever so slowly, peered over the top.

Good. The connection with Deep 13 had been terminated when the Movie Sign initiated. Although that was also bad: he'd have to call back to contact his younger self, and that ran a considerable risk of coming face-to-face with the Mads. But he'd sort that out in a minute; first, there was the little matter of--

Ah. A quick scan of the main navigation board told Mike exactly what he hoped to learn: the air supply to the bridge was holding steady. Mike didn't know if Joel was simply more obedient when it came to heading into the theater or Forrester was far more lenient with his original guinea pig, but either way, not having to run out of O2 was a boon to Mike's whole not-getting-caught strategy.

These two data points established, Mike sprang up from his crouch and waved to Cambot, who was floating idle near the forward viewscreens.

"Cambot, is there a way you can connect to Deep 13 but with our video feed on a delay or something?" he asked.

Cambot stared him down disapprovingly. How the bot managed this, when his one eyepiece was literally a camera lens, Mike had no idea -- even if it was all in his head, he felt pretty well intimidated.

"Look, okay, I know I've been acting kinda fishy, all the calling around to Earth when Joel's not here, but we're on the up and up now," Mike assured the camera bot. "You heard us earlier, right? There's nothing to worry about."

Not endowed with a voice box of any kind, Cambot responded with a disgruntled whirring noise, which he achieved by changing the depth of field on his lens. He then swung his lens toward the theater, then back to Mike.

"...You want me to go watch the movie?" Mike hazarded.

Cambot swung his body side to side.

"...Something to do with Joel?"

Cambot nodded.

"Okay... I'm going to take a wild guess and say I think we're heading into a conversation topic well outside the realm of pantomime here," said Mike, holding up his hands. "So to save on time, can you just help me out with a visual or something?"

The bot's lens made a grinding noise in frustration, but gave a curt nod of assent. Behind Cambot, the primary forward viewscreen flicked on, patched into Cambot's live feed to show Mike, neatly framed in a medium shot at the desk.

"So, I'm at the desk, and I'm... what?" Mike prompted.

On the viewscreen, a cheap CGI overlay appeared around the border of the frame. It was bright pink and filled with sparkles, centering Mike into a heart-shaped outline.

Mike felt himself start to sweat, especially when the gaussian camera effect kicked in, drenching his video image in a gorgeous buttery glow. "Uh, Cambot, look, um, I'm really, fl-flattered, but, uh--"

The camera view panned to one side, putting Mike off-center within the heart cutout. On the other side, Cambot layered in a still store image of Joel, looking like his usual cheerfully laid-back self. Their faces side-by-side like this in a little kitschy photo frame, Mike thought he and Joel looked the very image of two very dorky, very overgrown prom dates.

"Oh."

Cambot added extra sparkles and 3D hearts floating in front of the display, for added effect.

_"Oh."_

Feeling his point made, Cambot made a curt nod and the viewscreen behind him went black again. He adjusted his lens and settled his monocular gaze onto Mike again, expectantly.

Mike, meanwhile, was faintly sure his cheeks were still glowing, even without the camera effect.

"Uh," he managed after a while, when it seemed clear Cambot's gaze wasn't letting up. "Look, um... Joel and I have known each other for like a _week_. You know that, right?"

No reaction. Mike fought down a mental flail and persevered.

"And... dating and stuff, it usually takes a lot longer than that," he said. "You can't just make two people fall in -- you know."

A faint glimmer appeared in Cambot's lens. If he were more anthropomorphic, Mike would be sure the robot was giving him the stink eye.

"Okay! Love!" Mike said, relenting and throwing up his hands. "I'm a grown guy, I can say the word! What's your point, Cambot? Just -- connect me with Deep 13 so I can settle all this! I mean, I'm doing this for his sake. You know that, right?"

Cambot's lense made a faint _'querk'_ sound, as it twisted a quarter circle to the right. The effect was similar to a person tilting their head to the side skeptically.

"You heard me," Mike insisted, jaw set tight. It felt a little ridiculous, confessing this sort of stuff to a floating camera, but he was nearing the end of his rope. He'd already come this far and more or less pledged the same thing to Joel directly, if not in so many words. All that remained was getting his younger self up to speed. "Now make the call, Mister Cambot."

Slowly, still clearly skeptical, Cambot drifted back into his original position and flicked on his yellow 'call connecting' light. Mike settled back onto his heels and smoothed the front of his jumpsuit -- then immediately wrinkled it again, reaching back to scratch at the nail marks beneath his collar. The cortisone didn't really help when he got nervous and perspired, it seemed.

The viewscreen behind Cambot shimmered to life, opening back on the same shot of Deep 13 that Joel and the bots had just left. Mike could vaguely make out his younger self digging through crates in the background, while Frank continued scarfing on his powdered donettes on the couch.

"Joel...?" Frank warbled through a full mouth, looking up at -- Mike guessed -- some light above Deep 13's own A/V system. "Are you covering the camera?"

 _Good._ That was one thing squared away, keeping the outgoing video on a delay.

Frank climbed up from the couch with obvious effort, shuffling over toward the monitor. He squinted into what Mike presumed was a fully blank screen. What Frank expected to see, Mike couldn't guess.

"Why aren't you in the movie, Joel?" Frank demanded. "If you're ditching, I'll tell Doctor F on you!"

"Uh..." Mike froze, mind racing as he tried to decide what cover to use. It had been a few years since he'd had to deal with TV's Frank at length, and while it wasn't exactly _challenging_ , he was pretty rusty. He settled on a high falsetto. "Oh, no, Mister TV's Frank! This is Gypsy calling! Could you put Mike on, please?"

Cambot was giving him a hard look again. Mike could feel the marks along his back start to sting once more, as another bead of sweat trickled down his neck. But he bit his lip and held on.

"He's busy!" Frank objected, pouting in a way that suggested he was mostly disappointed the call wasn't for him. "Why d'ya wanna talk to him anyway?"

"Um, um... That's a girl's secret!"

At this, Frank's eyes lit up. _"Say,"_ he said. "I didn't know you were a fembot with feelings, Gypsy! I'm seeing a whole new side of you! Or, hearing it anyway... Is something up with your video?"

"Oh no," Mike croaked, voice wavering for a moment. "I'm just a little shy, is all. Would you please get Mike for me now?"

"Wellllll I shouldn't pull him away from his work," Frank drawled, craning his head back at the blond head barely visible behind a row of sinister shelves. "But okay!"

Frank sauntered away toward the rear of the laboratory to bark at Mike-the-temp. Aboard the SOL bridge, Mike exhaled heavily and massaged the side of his throat.

"Mike..." a falsetto voice intoned, right next to his ear.

"--GAH."

Mike jumped what felt like a good six feet into the air, lurching and colliding with the edge of the desk while he clamped one hand over his heart, hammering frenetically in his chest. He swung his head over his shoulder and found the glowing monocular gaze of Gypsy's head lamp bearing down on him.

"If you needed me to cover for you, you could have just asked," she said severely. "That was a _very_ unflattering impression you just did. My voice isn't that high!"

"Sorry, Gypsy," Mike gasped, still clutching his chest. "Didn't... see you there..."

"Yo, Mike here," came a chipper voice from the viewscreen. "How can I help you, uh, Gypsy, is it?"

Now that he heard it again, Mike-the-time-traveler didn't think _his_ voice was that high either. He scowled and took a deep breath to steady his heartrate a bit, then nodded to Cambot to activate the outgoing video feed.

"Hey," Mike the elder greeted his younger self, whose mouth fell open in surprise as the feed connected. "Uh, sorry for the runaround, but look, we need to straighten a few things out."

"Oh, it's all taken care of," younger Mike assured him, dropping his voice to an eager conspiratorial whisper which was not actually quiet in any respect. "Soon as I got in today, I conned Frank out of his keys and transferred manual control of the _Deus ex Machina_ to the Satellite of Love. You're all set to go!"

Grinning proudly, Mike-the-temp held up the crowded keyring from Frank and jangled it. Aboard the SOL, Mike-the-time-traveler cringed and pressed a hand to his forehead.

"Okay, so nevermind that part," Mike the elder muttered. "Listen, the plan's changed: Joel and I aren't coming down and you aren't coming up here. So just, uh... put in a good day's work, make sure they sign your timecard, and let's call it good, all right?"

Younger Mike pursed his lips, put out. His time-traveling counterpart spotted him stealing a glance to the side, as if looking to Gypsy for confirmation.

"Um, sure..." Mike-the-temp said slowly, his gaze sliding back over to his older self when it seemed no information from Gypsy was forthcoming. "So, uh, what's really going on?"

Mike-the-time-traveler's expression fell. "Huh?"

"I mean, a few days ago you were rarin' to get out of there," younger Mike reminded him. "So what happened? What aren't you telling me? Are you infected with some weird space-borne flesh-eating virus you don't want to introduce into Earth's atmosphere?"

"No. No!" Mike the elder exclaimed, nose crinkling in revulsion. "Why'd your mind go _there_ of all places? Look, it's just complicated, all right? Don't even worry about it. Just put the whole thing out of your mind, and... and... Trust me, you're not missing out on anything by not coming up here anyway," he finished pathetically.

Younger Mike looked worse than simply confused now -- he looked cross as well. "What the hey, man?" he asked his older self. "You're leaving me down here working temp jobs while you go off on another five hundred-odd years of space adventures? What kind of a deal is that?"

"A good one, for you," Mike the elder assured his younger counterpart. "No bad movies, no running out of food, or running out of air, or getting stranded in ancient times locked in a psionic tractor beam to some vengeful old woman's VW microbus... I'm seriously doing you a favor here! So just, just, stay down there on Earth, you know, find a nice girl, have an easy life..."

"And what about you?" younger Mike demanded. "What's so important that you and that Joel guy gotta stay up there even longer than you already have?"

"Oh, you don't understand!" Gypsy chirped, before Mike could stop her. "Mike and Joel are in love!"

On the viewscreen, younger Mike blinked. He blinked again. His mouth opened, and then closed, and then he drew himself up, brow knotted, lips formed around a question which just didn't seem to want to leave his throat.

On the bridge of the Satellite of Love, meanwhile, older Mike was slowly sinking out of sight behind the desk.

Gypsy looked from one to the other in complete befuddlement. "That's right, isn't it?" she asked innocently, even as the Mike next to her kept trying to shrink right out of existence. "What's the matter now? Shouldn't you both be happy?"

"Uh," younger Mike quavered. "You're Gypsy, right?"

"That's me!" she answered cheerfully, without a hitch.

"Could you give us a few minutes alone, please, Gypsy?" younger Mike asked politely.

Still clearly puzzled about what she had said wrong, Gypsy quickly excused herself and slithered off the bridge. Mike the elder, meanwhile, was almost done hiding himself below the desk when his younger counterpart cleared his throat.

"So," younger Mike said, in a voice that was even _higher_ than the one Mike the elder didn't believe sounded like him, "when were you going to get around to telling me about this?"

Mike-the-time-traveler peeked his head out over the edge of the desk, meekly. "Uh," he managed.

"Because this seems like something I should be let in on," Mike-the-temp continued, placing his hand over his heart, just above the large pinback button on his jumpsuit which read 'Happy Temps!' "I mean, if I'm actually gay, that sounds like information I should have. You know, for my own personal reference..."

"You're not gay," Mike the elder said, a little too quickly. Still, he mustered what fragile little bit of courage he could scrape together and pulled himself back up to his feet. "It's not like that. It's... something complicated, I don't even think there's a name for it."

"Oh. I get it," younger Mike said, nodding patiently now. "It's just that situational thing -- you're both trapped in space, no women around, it's like prison--"

" _No._ Not like --" Older Mike shook his head, a feeling of nausea rising in his throat. The worst part was knowing that his own younger self meant well, and, in his place, Mike-the-time-traveler would have asserted the same thing. "If you knew him you'd understand."

"Apparently, if I'm about to forego a shot at getting back to Earth for him," said Mike-the-temp, brow raised and bunched together in a look which bordered on some kind of sad resignation, or maybe pity. "I'm trying to get it, man. I am. It's just..."

"I know, I know."

"...He's not even cute."

Mike gave his former self a stern look. "Hey now," he warned.

Younger Mike held up his hands, feigning innocence on the matter. In his left hand he still held Frank's keys, which jangled again. "I'm just saying," he said, adding a small smile.

He was trying, Mike the elder had to give him that. It was just more uncomfortable than helpful, so the sooner they could get away from this whole subject, the better. Besides, Joel and the bots had to be getting out for their first break soon, and this was the last conversation Mike wanted them to walk into.

On the viewscreen, younger Mike appeared to straighten nervously. In the same moment, those aboard the bridge on the SOL heard a familiar, lazily malevolent drawl.

"So _that's_ where my keys went! You're turning into more trouble than you're worth, you know that?"

As younger Mike froze in place in front of Deep 13's monitor display, Frank emerged from a side room, the donette dust brushed from his jacket and replaced by a fetching pink feather boa (the evil purpose of which was not immediately apparent). He strode quickly to the lab's A/V panel, grasping for his keys with a plump palm, and stopped mid-reach, drawn by the image on-screen.

On the SOL bridge, Mike-the-time-traveler dove for his hiding spot just a moment too late.

The next noise was something like a Scooby Doo impersonation, as Frank's eyes bugged nearly completely out of his skull and he started to gibber. "D-d-dooplegonger!" he bellowed, grabbing Mike-the-temp by the arm. "Ohhh, Doctor F was right, you are bad news, Mister Temp! I'm gonna put a stop to this before you clone yourself any more!"

"Wait, Frank!" Mike the elder shouted desperately, coming up from his abortive dive beneath the desk to lean across it, closer to Cambot's lens. "You got it all wrong!"

"Get behind me, Satan!" Frank shouted, pushing his face right in front of the camera in turn. "Clay said we'd eliminate the temp at the end of the audit, and that's what we're gonna do, clone or no clone!"

"'Eliminate the--'" Mike-the-time-traveler repeated, face bunching up as he tried to process not just these words, but a certain dim and distant memory. "Wait a second! You mean, you were planning to kill _me_ the whole time?"

"Well, duh, we only thought of it this morning," Frank retorted, turning up his lip, as he manhandled younger Mike's arms behind his back. He wasn't especially strong, Mike knew, but as Forrester's henchman Frank could occasionally do the work he was employed for. "I don't know how you got up there in space, clone temp, or how you inexplicably aged a few years and you're wearing Joel's blue and red striped ringer shirt beneath that jumpsuit--"

Mike glanced down at his shirt, noticing the pattern for the first time.

"--but I'm going to deal with you just as soon as Clay and I deal with this one here!" Frank concluded.

"Wait," Mike-the-time-traveler repeated, slamming his palms down on the desk of the bridge. "Frank, no! We're not clones; I'm from the future. If you kill me that would be really bad! You might create a t--"

Down in Deep 13, Mike-the-temp was fighting, panicked, under the henchman's grip. Frank slammed him effortlessly against the A/V control panel, and in the process, smashed the key which severed the video connection.

"--ime paradox," Mike finished, to a black screen.

He fell silent, staring numbly at the blank viewscreen and at Cambot, who flicked off his recording light and regarded Mike carefully.

Mike's gaze fell to his hands on the desk. He tried to breathe, but the room already seemed to be spinning around him.

Joel's life was never in danger at _all_. For five years, Mike had accepted as fact until the information has slipped completely from memory that Gypsy had enlisted his help to evacuate Joel because the Mads were planning to kill him. But in actuality, Joel had actually been perfectly safe, just as he'd told Mike he would be. And Mike, on the other hand... 

Palms pressed hard against the desk, Mike could feel his pulse shuddering through his fingers, pounding rhythmically against the wood and his knuckles.

If the Mads killed him -- well, Mike wasn't an expert on the finer points of time travel, but he was _pretty sure_ he wouldn't survive that one. And the only way he could get to his younger self right now was...

 _No,_ the back part of his mind pleaded.

But it was right there. He _had_ to. There was nothing else.

And more than anything else, there was definitely no time to think about it.

But he just _couldn't_ , not without at least some explanation. He owed Joel that much. With one last glance toward Cambot, Mike slipped his hands from the surface of the desk and into the pockets of his jumpsuit. A moment later, his hands emerged with a pencil and a fistful of butcher paper.


	10. Day 7, Part 2

"Boy, Joel, you're really out of it today," Crow observed, as they returned from the theater. He watched as his creator struggled to even keep apace with him down the hallway, ambling in slow, shallow steps like he had broken eggshells inside his sneakers. "You were barely getting any riffs in there at all."

"Oh," Joel mumbled, through a much thicker fugue than the bots were accustomed to. "I guess it's just this Joe Don Baker picture, guys. Must be throwing me off my game."

"You sure it's not _Mike_ throwing you off, Joel?" Servo jeered, hovering near Joel's waist level. "Some unfinished business from this morning, perhaps?"

"We're sitting in there trying to endure a lump of yeasty uncooked bread dough masquerading as a detective film, and this guy's just hanging out and daydreaming," Crow decided, nodding along with his mechanical brethren. "Kind of pathetic, really."

"Yup," Servo concurred. He sighed in resignation. "But that's what love does to people! Makes fools of us all!"

"Would you two cut it out," Joel grumbled, as they reached the door to the bridge. "How long are you gonna be on this whole 'marriage' thing, anyway?"

"Till you put a ring on it," Crow answered immediately.

"A ring on wha-- oh." Joel dragged a hand through his hair, mussing it considerably, and activated the door control.

"There you guys are!" Gypsy exclaimed, as the door slid aside. She was spooled up near the desk, her long-lashed eye burning bright in panic. "Have you seen Mike?"

"He's not here?" Joel asked, seeming to wake up a bit. "He said he was going to hang around on the bridge for a while..."

"He got in touch with his younger self and then he disappeared!" Gypsy reported. "And he left this note!"

She held it up between her rubber lips: it was a note, all right, done in surprisingly neat cursive on a scroll of butcher paper which ran all the way from Gypsy's mouth onto the desk and from there onto the floor. Where Mike had gotten the time to write it all, in the few minutes between Joel and the bots had entered the theater till now, was a complete mystery.

Joel strode quickly over to the desk, walking with an obvious stiffness that meant he was still hurting from whatever injury he had complained of earlier that morning. He grabbed the paper from Gypsy's mouth and began to read aloud.

"'Dear Joel,'" he read. "'I'm sorry for what I'm about to do but I had no other option--'"

"Want me to read the address for the fan club, Joel?" Servo spoke up.

"Not now, Servo. 'I'm also sorry for taking your ringer shirt and a different pair of your tube socks, but I didn't have time to go change...'" Joel scanned down the elegant pencil scrawl. "Uh... 'No matter what my younger self says, you're good-looking and you've got a great sense of humor' -- aw, that's sweet -- 'and I'll always treasure the time we had together, especially the way you never made fun of me wearing socks with my sandals...'?"

Joel glanced up at Cambot to share a confused grimace, then looked further at the letter.

"Uh, there's actually a lot about socks in here," he explained after a moment, to no one in particular. "Crew socks... Ankle socks... Playing footsie under the breakfast table... Okay, here we are: 'I'm sure now that the reason I kept coming back here after slipping through time and space was that we shared some weird sort of destiny, even if it's the really unfortunate and screwed-up kind mostly involving our poor choice of employers... And I want you to know that even if we _have_ known each other only for about a week, at least in this timeline, I think Gypsy's right about us.' Gypsy, what's he mean by--'"

Beneath the crew's feet, the flooring of the bridge gave a sudden lurch. The regular white-balanced bridge lights dimmed, replaced with red emergency lights and the sounding of an alarm Crow had never heard before.

"What the--" Joel exclaimed, clutching the desk for balance. "Gypsy, what's going on?"

"It's Mike!" she gasped. "He's activated the escape pod in Dock 14!"

"We have an escape pod in Dock 14?" Servo yelled. "Imagine all the little games of space wars we could've played with that!"

"At least one!" Crow agreed, equally furious.

Joel, meanwhile, seemed to already be on to other things. "Cambot, give me Rocket Number Nine!" he ordered, slapping his palm containing the letter down onto the surface of the desk.

Cambot complied immediately. In an instant, the bridge's forward viewscreens flashed with an exterior view of the satellite, zooming in on the furthest of the starboard side airlocks as it separated from the hull, folding outward to reveal a massive wooden crate.

"Hamdingers?!" Crow shouted, seeing the spray-painted lettering. "Why, that dirty, good-for-nothing Packers fan...!"

"Crow!" Joel warned.

"Well, he _is!_ " the gold robot insisted. "Otherwise how would you explain _this?!_ He was conning us all along, Joel! A classic ninth inning backstab!"

"Football doesn't have innings... And I'm sure there's a good explanation for all this," said Joel, as he started to compose himself -- or tried to, anyway. With his keen optics, Crow made out a tremble in Joel's hands, as he cleared the long letter off the edge of the desk with just a little too much force. "Gypsy! Can you still get him on the Hexfield?"

"Yes! I still have manual control over nonessential pod functions!" Gypsy reported. "Opening a direct feed now!"

On the rear starboard wall, the angular Hexfield viewscreen dilated open, revealing a cramped interior view of the single-unit escape pod. It was made more cramped by the fact Mike was occupying it, his knees almost bent against his chest in the effort to fit into the undersized seat.

"Joel--?" Mike asked, his face alight with the escape pod's overhead control panel.

"Mike!" Joel said, seeming perhaps a bit more alert than usual but still his typical self, more curious than alarmed... that is, if you didn't spot his white-knuckled death grip along the edge of the desk. "I found your letter, but-- I don't get what's going on?"

"Oh god, um." Mike had the decency to look incredibly guilty, or perhaps that was just the effect of being hunched into a ball. "I'm sorry, Joel -- I don't know what to say. I know I said I'd stay with you on the station, and I meant it, but..."

"But that's the only escape pod..."

"I know -- I know. I don't want to do this, Joel, but I need to go! If I die here in the past, I die in real life!"

"Now he's using anachronisms on us!" Crow raged. "Mike, I take back every nice thing I ever said about you!"

"You've never said _anything_ nice about me, Crow!" Mike protested.

"And now I'm never gonna start!" Crow retorted.

Distantly, the bots detected the grind of the escape pod's railing extending, as the Hamdingers crate began taxiing to the end of Dock 14's launch pad. They were running short on time, and Joel's mild-mannered appeals, while heartbreakingly charming as always, were getting them nowhere.

"After all those musical numbers! The cheat! Philanderer! Leading our cute, innocent, darling Joel down a path of unwholesomeness and then running out on him like this!" Servo snarled. He swiveled his head around to meet his fellow bot's gaze. "He is _not_ leaving this ship, Crow!"

"'Least not till after _we_ get through with him!" Crow agreed, his legs unfolding to their full height as he and Tom Servo both turned to race back down the ship's main corridor.

"You guys!" Gypsy cried after them, unheard, as the door to the bridge swished shut behind them. "Don't--"

* * *

"--do anything which reinforces mid-century patriarchal gender norms!" Gypsy finished yelling, a sliver of a shape in the corner of the escape pod's tiny built-in monitor. Mike barely noticed.

Joel was coming apart in front of him. To the uninitiated he must have looked as in control as always -- calm, maybe a little bewildered, but that was all. If Mike hadn't seen so much of him up close in the last week, he would've been fooled too. Now he could hardly look at him.

So, he didn't. Mike looked away, jaw set, flicking a series of switches along the control panel at his right. He barely knew what they all even did, but they were flashing, and the 'Ready Ignition' switch hadn't lit up yet, so he decided they had to be flipped first.

"Mike, stop the launch," Joel urged, barely more than a dark outline in Mike's peripheral vision. "Gypsy can't do it from here, but you can still shut it down from your systems panel. Come on, man... Think about all we've been through..."

"It's only been a week, Joel," said Mike, his eyes darkening.

"That's not how you felt about it in your note," Joel pointed out. "Besides -- add up all the other timelines where you met me and I bet it comes out to be more than that!"

Mike winced. Sure, there had been other occasions, like that man with the glasses he met -- and Mike even had a theory for _why_ it kept happening. But if he waxed sentimental about all that now, he'd just end up repeating what he'd written in the letter. And there was just no time anymore.

"I'm sorry," Mike repeated, feeling like a cold knife had been slipped between his ribs. "Joel, you're a great guy, but... If I don't get down there right now and save myself, I'm dead all over."

"Forrester wouldn't _really_ kill you," Joel insisted. "He's not that kind of guy! I mean, he _is_ , but -- you gotta trust me on this. It'll be fine! What about that stuff we said in the greenhouse? Butterflies and, and... Well, you know! What if this is just some parallel universe to yours anyway, and there's no direct line of temporal causality, or what if, just by you coming back in time, it _created_ a parallel universe and--!"

Mike shook his head sharply. If he stopped to think about it there were too many variables to make heads or tails of. What he knew for sure was what Brain Guy said: that changing the past anymore would be catastrophic for all the rest of time and space. And Mike was _pretty sure_ from all the movies he watched on this subject that his past self dying counted as a change in history.

"I screwed this all up ever getting my old self involved," he ground out. "If I don't fix this, something worse is going to happen to all of us. I already blew up the Earth once and... I'm really not looking forward to doing that again."

Joel, gazing through the video feed, didn't seem to process any of this. Or he did, and it was just as unremarkable to him as any of the other stories Mike had told him in the last week. He was just so damned good at taking Mike's existence in stride like that.

"Mike," Joel said, his voice dropping to a low and hollow murmur, so quiet Mike should not have even been able to hear it amidst the sirens and the escape pod's retro thrusters humming to life. "Don't leave me alone."

Mike tried to form an answer, but no words came out. Not even another apology.

Tearing his eyes away from the monitor, Mike reached over to the main systems panel again and turned the final ignition key, now lit. The escape pod's boosters ground to life with a low howl. When he glanced back at the monitor, only the black screen containing his reflection stared back at him.

Mike felt the escape pod lurch on its platform, and in the same moment his stomach started climbing up into his throat. He reached for the release levers mounted to either side of his seat, but both remained locked under his hands. On the overhead console, the Christmas pin lights which made up the main status array twinkled from mostly green to yellow and red.

"The heck--"

He tugged hard on the starboard release lever, until the cheap metal groaned and contorted at the point where its gears stuck. From outside the escape pod came a thunderous, wrenching sound, a shriek of metal on metal as plates of the Satellite of Love's docking platform buckled and collided with each other. Red emergency lights bled across the pod's control panels, tiny warning noises beginning an asynchronous torrent of shrieks just before something massive punched right into the side of Mike's hull.

Despite being belted in, the walls of the pod were close enough that the impact knocked Mike clear against the opposite side, wrenching the starboard release lever clear from its base and, more importantly, sending his head colliding edge-on with the in-flight music selection panel.

"Mike!" Joel's voice crackled, somewhere, his outline floating on the monitor through the static and the smoke in Mike's eyes; the blood pooling in his mouth; the darkness, eating at his eyes, pulsing and swallowing up everything. "Guys, what did you-- _Mike!_ "

* * *

Joel had finally reached the point where standing was more uncomfortable than sitting.

He took a seat in the chair next to the bed, lowering himself as slowly and carefully as his stiff and overtired body allowed him to move. Slouching, he turned his gaze toward the motionless lump occupying the bunk again, and then checked his watch.

The _Mitchell_ screening had concluded hours ago. The bots were asleep in their cabins, or so he hoped. The report with the Mads had been filed, and everything on the ship was quiet again, somehow, after all that had happened.

Joel still didn't know how he had managed to get down to Dock 14, climb through the burning wreckage of the airlock to reach Mike's unconscious body, and make it all the way back up to the theater in time for the next theater statement, but he supposed he should be glad. The rest of the experiment day had gone on as though nothing extraordinary had occurred, although Gypsy had turned up during the closing host segment to report that Dock 14's outer airlock was damaged beyond repair, and Mike still hadn't woken up from his concussion.

Now, hours later, he still hadn't, and Joel was losing his own battle with fatigue. He ought to leave the cabin soon to grab a sleeping bag, set up camp on the floor beside Mike's bed again... but he just couldn't compel himself to do it yet. Joel was half-sure that the moment Mike left his peripheral vision, he'd disappear completely.

Joel hunched forward in his chair, massaging the inner corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger until little purple dots flashed against his eyelids. He looked over again to ascertain that Mike's body was where he had left it just a few seconds ago. No change-- still laid out in the bunk with half his head done up in bandages, courtesy of an overzealous Nurse Gypsy, and no movement save the same steady rise and fall of his chest.

"Wonder where you are now," Joel said softly, his voice barely rising above a murmur. "Or when."

...What a week.

There had been a moment, back there on the bridge, when Joel had locked eyes with Mike over the Hexfield and it felt like the floor had given way beneath him. Not only that, but as though the entire physical universe had come unmoored around Joel's feet. He didn't remember what he had said then -- although it was on tape, so he could probably ask Cambot to check -- but the way that Mike had frozen up in response had Joel's heart lodging itself in his throat even now. It had said everything about the reckless, breakneck momentum of this so-called relationship of theirs; about just how completely ridiculous and unsolvable it had become; and how neither one of them was apparently cut out for this human intimacy business.

What a _wreck._

"Joel...?"

The voice was scratchy with sleep, barely audible above Joel's own loud thoughts, such that he nearly didn't process it at first. He dropped his hand from his eyes and looked up.

Mike, his eyelids still red and puffy from the smoke that had ravaged the docking bay, blinked sluggishly up at Joel, squinting through the haze of what Joel guessed must at least be a very intense headache.

"Mike--!" Joel did not so much leave as fall from the seat of his chair, ignoring the aches and pains shooting up his back as he landed on his knees, scooting over to the edge of the bed. "Hey, there, buddy. Welcome back."

"My head..." Clumsily, Mike lifted a hand to prod at the mass of gauze taped over his right temple.

"It's not that bad," Joel assured him, gently but matter-of-factly taking Mike's hand by the wrist and guiding it back down to his side. And then he just held onto it there. "Gypsy just went a little overboard. You kinda got your brain rattled around a bit, but some more sleep and you should be fine."

"Thanks..." Mike murmured.

"Heck, I didn't do much," said Joel. He released Mike's hand only long enough to reach over to the bedside table for a glass of water and some aspirin, which he offered to his bed guest until Mike took them. "Just stared at you while you slept, like some kinda weirdo."

"I don't mind weird," said Mike absently, handing back the glass when he was finished. His eyes slid shut again for a moment as he turned his head to the side against the pillow. When he opened them again, Joel thought they seemed a little clearer. "The escape pod..."

"Oh. That's... pretty well out of commission," Joel confirmed, offering an apologetic smile. "So's the airlock. And most of deck six, at least till we finish the repairs."

Mike rolled his head aside again, gazing toward the ceiling instead. "Sorry. Guess I really broke things this time."

"Aw, hey, don't worry about it," Joel told him brightly. "It's all just stuff. I make and take apart things all the time."

"But that was--"

"Like I can't build us an escape pod," Joel teased, kneeling up so that he could rest his arms on the edge of the mattress, leaning over Mike. "We'll figure something out when the time comes. Till then, the Earth's not going anywhere, right?"

Mike's eyes flicked back to his companion, frowning uncertainly, searching Joel's face for something. "What, so you're not... upset about it?"

"That whole thing? Nah," Joel lied. Mike's frown deepened. "Okay, so maybe it was total rending heartbreak there for a while," he confessed. "But Crow and Servo didn't have to try and _kill_ you. I know I taught them better than that."

"How are they doing, anyway?"

"Not so bad. I sent 'em to bed without supper. Told them they needed to apologize to you when you woke up." Joel offered Mike a small smile again. "Think you can forgive them for the whole attempted murder thing?"

"Aw, I'm sure they didn't mean it," said Mike, rolling his shoulders in a lateral shrug. "What about you, though?"

"Well, sure, _I_ can forgive them. I built them."

"No, I meant... me," said Mike, hovering over the last word like a confession.

"Oh, you're fine," Joel said without even a pause, waving a hand dismissively at the very absurdity of the question. Sure, the whole business had been _frightening_ \-- and he'd felt really betrayed at the moment it was all happening -- but grudges slid off Joel like oil on a nonstick pan. "If anything, _I_ shoulda been clearer about just how bad Forrester is at killing people. I mean, at least on the keeping-them-dead front."

Mike watched Joel's expression carefully, as though studying it for a trace of sarcasm. Or, what was more likely, he just couldn't see Joel's features all that well without his contacts. He blinked a couple times, at a loss.

"So wait," Mike said slowly, after a heavy pause. "So I just wrecked part of the ship... lost the escape pod... got my head banged up like this... nearly left _you_ behind... all for nothing?"

"Yeah, but it's not all bad," Joel answered brightly. "At least we all learned something."

"We did?" Mike asked, looking dubious.

"Sure," said Joel, slipping his hand around Mike's again. This time, when he squeezed, he felt Mike return the pressure. It sent a funny little tickle through Joel's chest. "Crow and Servo learned the meaning of attempted third-degree murder, Gypsy learned how many boxes of Micro Machines it takes to plug a hole in the station's hull, and you learned what a concussion feels like."

"I learned _that_ one in second grade," Mike groaned, the corner of his mouth -- which still bore a bruise from the phone cord incident -- twitching upward into a wry smile. "So what about you?"

"I, uh..." Joel hesitated, but only for a moment. After all, he'd had plenty of time to think about this, back when Mike was passed out. He shifted on his knees, edging closer. "Well, I might've had a change of heart about some stuff... About staying out of things that are 'complicated,' for example."

"Yeah?" said Mike, his brow creasing beneath the bandages. His eyes were more alert than they had been throughout the entire conversation so far. Maybe the aspirin was taking effect.

"Mm-hm," Joel confirmed, nodding. An easy smile spread across his face. "I think maybe we should try it. You know, go slow at first, but..."

"Isn't it kinda late for that?" Mike asked, starting to grin. Joel still thought he had improbably nice teeth.

"Oh, whatever," Joel answered, leaning in for a kiss. "We'll figure it out as we go."

Mike's eyes fell closed, and Joel followed suit, tilting his head and closing the remaining space between them. But instead of meeting Mike's mouth with his own, he felt only air.

He squeezed his hand around Mike's, but his fingers closed around only his own palm.

Joel's eyes shot wide open, coming face-to-face only with wrinkled sheets and a tangle of bandages, lying abandoned on the pillowcase.

_What--_

He tried to move -- to sweep his hand over the sheets, to push himself to his feet, to even blink again -- but his body seemed frozen in place. Steadily, he became aware of his pulse quickening; his breathing grew unsettled and the thoughts in his head raced.

How? What did it mean? Mike had never just flickered out like this -- that wasn't how it worked, Joel was sure he had figured this out -- did this mean that Mike's younger self--?

Joel's heartbeat pounded in his ears. He forced himself to stand up; to bite back the darker thoughts, steady his breath... His throat felt like a hand had wrapped around it and squeezed it shut.

_You've lost him,_ said a voice rattling around in Joel's skull. _You've lost him you've lost him you'velosthim--_

"Joel...?"

The hairs on the back of Joel's neck stood straight up and he turned, spinning around.

The source of the voice stood square in the middle of Joel's cabin. He stood in a weathered blue jumpsuit, grubby, soaked to the knees in mud and reeking of gunpowder. His face, barely visible beneath a layer of ash, was further obscured by several weeks of scraggly beard growth and a steel British Army helmet, sloped over one side of his head and still smoldering where some stray bullet had punched a dent into its surface.

Joel had barely a second to process any of this before the man rushed forward, grabbing two fistfuls of Joel's jumpsuit and pulling their mouths together into a hard, desperate kiss.

"Augh! God!" Joel exclaimed, choked and out of breath when at last he managed to break off the embrace. "Mike, stop! Your breath is _horrible!_ "

"I thought I'd never see you again," Mike panted, pressing sloppy, bedraggled kisses over Joel's cheeks, jaw and neck. "After the fourth month I lost track... Joel. Joel! I missed you so much..."

"I missed you too, champ," Joel assured him, at a loss and overwhelmed. He struggled to wriggle free as Mike wrapped his arms around him in a staggering bear hug.

Mike leaned his head back, only enough to meet Joel's gaze. His expression was suddenly deep-set and serious. "...Did you used to have long hair?" he asked.

"Huh??"

"Nevermind -- come here--"

Joel managed to worm an arm between their bodies and cup his hand over Mike's whiskery mouth, shutting down any more muddy kisses for the time being. "Hey, just calm down for a second! You're not making sense and you're _really_ gross!"

Mike finally seemed to take the hint and relaxed his hug, giving Joel the room for air again. Joel took a couple deep breaths -- his mouth still tasted like mud and whatever foul stuff Mike had left on his teeth, since apparently brushing hadn't been an option for him for a while -- and then released his hand's grip over Mike's mouth as well.

"There," said Joel, relieved when Mike didn't launch into another advance with his tongue. "Now let's get you a shower, or... hose you down or something, at least. And then you can tell me all about it."

"I want you," Mike said, his voice adopting a husky edge that was made even more feral by the whole grizzled beard thing. His embrace slid from Joel's shoulders to linger around his waist.

"Oh... Uh, not tonight, I think," Joel said delicately, intervening with his hand around Mike's wrist when he started venturing below the belt. "I'm still kinda sore. Besides, we've been doing it a lot lately..."

" _I_ haven't," Mike said, sounding wounded.

"Um, right," Joel amended. "Well, we'll figure something out. But I'm not doing a thing while you still have that beard. Come on."

As Joel drew himself out of Mike's arms and made a best effort at guiding him in the general direction of the bathroom, Mike self-consciously reached up and scratched at the gnarled mat of whiskers clumped at his jaw. Tiny flakes of dried mud and (Joel hoped) other people's blood came away with his fingers.

"Sure we can't salvage it?" Mike asked, appearing not to notice.

" _Ugh_. No; definitely, completely beyond saving," Joel answered, looking away before he gagged. He thumbed open the door leading them out into the corridor, his other hand still circled around Mike's wrist. "I love you, sweetie, but that's too much."

"Are you sure?" Mike said doubtfully. "Beards really helped on _Next Generation_..."

"The beard goes, Mike," Joel told him adamantly. He didn't want to have to explain himself, but apparently he was out of options. "You look like Torgo."


	11. The Next Day

**The Next Day**

One shower, shave, haircut, and nap later (followed by the best blowjob of his life, in his modest opinion), Mike Nelson once again found himself aboard the bridge of the Satellite of Love. With Joel beside him, of course.

"So that's how it is, sirs," Joel finished, as on the main forward viewscreen Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank continued to stare them down. "Mike here time-traveled from the future after you sent him up to replace me after Gypsy mistook your intentions to kill him and evacuated me instead."

"I can't believe you summed that up in one sentence," said Mike, feeling a little disappointed.

" _I'm_ ashamed of myself and the error in judgment I made in an alternate timeline," Gypsy sighed, perched on her long, cabled body to the right side of the desk.

"Yes, well," Forrester said, squinting into the camera as Mike reached over to give Gypsy a comforting pat on the snout. "Be that as it may, there're some unanswered questions here! For starters: who killed Laura Palmer?"

"Aw, hey, no spoilers," Frank pouted beside him.

"It's been off the air for years, Frank! Move on! --Anyway," Forrester continued, sneering at Frank's interruption. "As you say, we _planned_ to do away with the jumpsuited Wonder Boy, but Frank here got distracted recording his soaps and I'm afraid it slipped our minds. Of course, now that you've revealed to us this Mike Nelson's true identity, I foresee us keeping him around for... _quite_ some time."

"Welp. Sounds like it sucks to be you," Crow piped up, also coming to join Mike and Joel at the bridge desk. "They're probably gonna cut off the other you's ear or give him an embarrassing tattoo to see if it shows up on you. That's kinda how these guys operate."

"Oh, he already has a tattoo," Joel said knowledgeably, rocking between the heel and ball of his feet. He stopped abruptly when he noticed Mike looking at him, and had the decency to look appear sheepish.

The damage appeared to be done, anyway. As Crow and Servo snickered, Mike spotted Forrester's glare moving from one of his captive subjects to the other, his lip curling beneath his mustache just a little more each time.

"Now, listen here, my little space bunnies," Forrester warned, with unambiguous disapproval for what he was seeing. "You're up there to watch bad movies while suffering a protracted psychological breakdown. I won't have you two fouling up my data points by having a positive effect on each other's mental health!"

"No, sir," agreed Joel, not even bothering to contain his smirk.

"That means no funny business," Forrester continued, waving a finger at the screen. "No hanky-panky, no hippity-dippity, and not a single instance of how's-your-father. Am I clear? Just because you're two men stranded alone in space is no reason for _shoddy science._ "

"But sir," Joel replied innocently, while Mike lost the battle to contain his own bout of snickering. "Aren't you and TV's Frank two men stranded alone in the center of the Earth?"

On the viewscreen, Mike saw Forrester's nostrils flare and the hairs of his mustache bristle in all directions. Beside him, Frank simply beamed.

"Well -- that's -- completely irrelevant to what we're discussing here," Forrester huffed, agitatedly adjusting his collar. "Fine, then! Have your jollies. Just see if I keep throwing you softballs like that Joe Don Baker picture from here on out. It's going to get _much_ worse now that there's two of you, oh _yes!_ "

As Forrester started to laugh, Mike and Joel exchanged another glance. That was probably reason to fret, sure, but on the other hand, it probably meant that Mike wouldn't be watching all the same movies over again. Which was some sort of silver lining, anyway.

"Uh, Doctor Forrester," Mike spoke up, once Forrester's bout of cackling seemed to be subsiding. On the viewscreen, Frank seemed to have lost interest and wandered off somewhere. "There's still one detail..."

" _Yes_ , what is it, Joel Two-Point-Oh?" Forrester snapped.

Before he could help it, Mike was desperately trying to hide a grin again. Forrester probably meant that as a slight but it sounded, well, kind of adorable? Dating did weird things to a guy's outlook.

"Uh, I'm still time-traveling," said Mike, after he managed to mostly compose himself. "So unless you know a way to stop that, you know you can't actually get any consistent data off me, right?"

"Oh! Hrm... Loathe as I am to admit it, you have a point there," the scientist sniffed, his skunk-striped mustache still flaring in all directions. "Very well! We can modify the satellite's heat shields to counteract the temporal interference. You'll be perfectly safe. As long as you stay up there in space, of course."

Despite himself, Mike felt a stone in the pit of his stomach when Forrester said that. True, he had no plans to leave the Satellite of Love now, as long as Joel was with him... But one day, the project _did_ have to end, right? And where would that leave the two of them? Or suppose this relationship thing fizzled out like a cheap bottle rocket, as most of Mike's relationships did, or something else happened that neither of them could predict...

Mike started, feeling warm fingers slide across his palm at his side. He looked over to find that Joel had, at some point, surreptitiously sidled closer, and grabbed Mike's hand just out of sight behind the desk.

Joel smiled -- that soft, dreamy look that he always had, especially when Mike woke up beside him in bed -- and, well, that was enough to get Mike to start feeling heaps better already.

"I think I can live with that," Mike told Dr. Forrester, looking back toward the forward viewscreen. 

He expected to find the scientist disinterestedly awaiting his reply, but instead, Forrester seemed to be glaring hard at where Joel's and Mike's joined hands disappeared below the edge of the desk. Mike could see Forrester's jaw working, the lines of his neck drawn tight and his eyes narrowed to a hateful squint. It was almost as if Forrester was... jealous?

Mike quickly locked that thought into a mental safe, then put that safe inside another mental safe, and threw it into a deep mental ocean. There were some things he just didn't need to know about Joel and Forrester's history together.

He sufficed for putting his arm around Joel's shoulders instead. _That_ cheered him right up, and made Forrester twitch and sputter mathematical obscenities under his breath, which was an added bonus.

"Anything else, sir?" Joel asked, practically glowing under the attention as his grin spread from ear to ear.

"I'll say," Forrester snarled, digging his nails into the back of a chair, covered in what Mike _hoped_ was ordinary animal leather. "I've got plans for you, my little Joelizo sausage, and they don't involve that -- that _temp_ ," he spat, glowering at Mike's hand resting on his beloved test subject's shoulder. "Enjoy yourselves while you can, cuties, for I can guarantee you both another four years ending in fiery _pain!_ "

Forrester drew a large breath, preparing for his most ominous and nefarious laugh yet that morning, when the voice of TV's Frank filtered up from somewhere off-screen.

"Oh, Clay!" Frank sang, probably calling from somewhere near the back of the laboratory. "Your mom's on the phone!"

As Mike and Joel watched, Forrester's face contorted into a series of complicated, perhaps painful expressions. His eyelid twitched, his cheeks puffed out, and Mike was very sure they were actually going to see some highly pressurized blood spray from a burst artery, before Forrester slammed down on the signal termination key.

The crew shared a nice, long collective chuckle, directed at the blank viewscreen.

"Well," Joel said to his bots. "All's well that ends well, huh?"

"Eh," Crow demurred, giving Mike the side-eye as he slouched over to Joel and Servo's side of the desk. "I _still_ wish we'd gotten to use that escape pod for joyriding."

"And I wasted _so_ much time on those musical numbers!" Servo complained.

"What, are you kidding?" Joel said brightly, giving the red bot a little pat on the back. His other arm slipped around Mike's waist, which was a pleasant feeling. "You two got your wish! Me an' Mike got together, and now we're a nice big happy family!"

"Yeah, but..." Servo trailed off.

"I just can't shake the feeling that something's missing!" said Crow. He still had his eyes fixed squarely on Mike. "Some kind of final twist to bookend this whole embarrassing, likely traumatizing experience."

Mike decided he had a pretty good idea where this gag was going, but he rested back on his heels and let Joel deliver the punchline. Beside him, Joel hummed thoughtfully and nodded, eyelids drooping almost shut as he appeared to meditate on Crow's suggestion.

"Okay, I think I've got something," he announced a moment later. He drew his arm back from being wrapped around Mike's waist to instead hook his fingers through one of Mike's belt loops. "Check this out."

Mike tucked his chin toward his chest and smirked into Joel's mouth as they shared a kiss. Nothing too showy, just warm, sweet and to the point. The exaggerated fake retching and cries of "gross!" from Crow and Servo was like music to Mike's ears.

"There, you're cured," Joel told his creations as he concluded the kiss, looking back over his shoulder. The bots were still trying to gag on their nonexistent tongues. "Now run along and go play in a ravine somewhere."

"That's one way to preserve the last of their innocence," Mike commented, looking on as Servo and Crow scrambled off the bridge with all possible haste. He slid his arm off Joel's shoulders, but only to reach down and squeeze his boyfriend's hip. "All right. So. Where we we?"

"Something about enjoying ourselves while we can?" Joel suggested, that wicked spark appearing in his half-lidded gaze once again.

"Hold it right there, misters! Cambot and I are still here, you know!" Gypsy objected, nosing in between them. Reluctantly, Mike withdrew his hand, allowing Gypsy to muscle her large coiled body into the space they used to occupy, forcing them at arm's length. "And this is _my_ bridge, so you two find somewhere else to horse around!"

"Yikes. Yes, ma'am," said Joel, amused. He stuck his hands at his hips, beaming with paternal fondness for the most sophisticated of his creations. "We'll let you get back to work up here, Gyps. Keep her flying."

"Technically, the Satellite of Love is falling at a constant rate toward the Earth," Gypsy responded absently, her long body unfurling as she slithered over toward the main navigation array. "Just like Richard Basehart around my heart."

"Wait," said Mike, who hadn't heard that name in a while, "how does that work?"

Joel waved him off. "Love is a mysterious gravitational force, my friend," he declared sagely. "Come on, let's go watch a movie."

* * *

Brain Guy closed the massive, leather-bound tome in his hands with a solid _whumph_.

"I suppose that about does it," he announced to a white void, evidently proud of whatever he had done or not done. It was impossible to tell, but he was going to take credit for it anyway.

Everything had come out in the wash, more or less, and if a few things were in places which they weren't before, well, the universe was seemingly none the wiser. This was how reality tended to work anyway: less a neatly ordered system, more a haphazard cludged-together mess which barely managed to keep itself going, and that was how it was supposed to be, really. Anything more regulated than this got dreadfully boring, even for an Observer.

There was one thing Brain Guy didn't understand, however, and he suspected it was going to nag at him for some time to come, figuratively speaking...

What, exactly, was this whole 'put a ring on it' nonsense anyway?

**End**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and for all your lovely comments! I hope you enjoyed. <3


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